A very personal piece this morning on how The Blue Nile's 'Hats', as well as being a cult classic, is the most important album in my life. RTs, shares and subscribers appreciated 🎶🙏 open.substack.com/pub/top10n…

I was not expecting to be reposted with my username by *the* Michael McKean when I woke up this morning...

With change from an hour, Tom Waits takes you on a journey through the urban underbelly of and beneath New York City. Rain Dogs is an experience, which once taken in, you'll never be the same again. This is a record that has absolutely everything you never knew you needed.

I'm 4 for 4 on World Cup games watched. 100 to go, and trying to watch as many as possible, just like when I was a teenager with no responsibilities. But Sweden v Tunisia feels like the earliest hurdle at 3am Monday morning...

If you don't know the song, you'll almost certainly recognise the riff instantly. The hit that samples it is good, but the original thing is one of the best pieces of music ever recorded. youtu.be/5b0jWlPtP5o?si=M0Vf…

#AllThatJazz #NoGoodMusicAnymore Mary Halvorson, Ambrose Akinmusire | Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings Does what it says on the tin; I'm drowning in these sumptuous trumpet tracks. The last two take me to another realm entirely - one of my favourite releases of 2026 so far.

Last 7 days out of my sling, elbow feeling just about good enough to start blogging again.

Pieces Of A Man is the centrepiece of Gil Scott Heron's solo debut, the title track and everything this record is about can be found here. Real, tough, ragged and so personalised about such a wide struggle - a revolutionary song, album, and man. youtu.be/QKghze-Vf1o?si=I-yS…

#NoGoodMusicAnymore Greg Foat | Blobs Music born out of the creativity of a birthday card from a 4-year-old, each of the nine blobs offer something between tranquility, introspection and solace. The master Foat just always produces the goods, doesn't he.

From Chelsea Girl to something unfathomable in a matter of months, The Marble Index was the first time Nico sounded how she wanted to sound. A siren amongst the blackest sea, an operatic and sinister soundscape permeates, never to be recreated. youtu.be/sxyaAHyIBHw?si=8BG6…

Although the idea of the album as a cohesive artistic statement had existed for years in other genres: jazz, folk, country, and adult pop like Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955), the rock ’n’ roll and pop world operated on a very different model through the early 1960s. Singles dominated the market by a wide margin. Albums were often little more than vehicles for already successful 45s: one or two hits (often the A- and B-sides), padded out with covers, lesser originals, or outright filler. Neither artists nor audiences invested too deeply in the format. So when discussions turn to the dawn of the “album era” in rock and pop, the conversation traditionally jumps to mid-1960s landmarks: the Beatles’ Rubber Soul (1965) or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (1965), the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), experimental releases like the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! (1966), or even The 13th Floor Elevators’ The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966). These albums are rightly celebrated for their reduced filler, greater thematic unity and for encouraging listeners to engage with the LP as a complete work. I would argue, however, that the first real signs of this shift arrived earlier. The seeds of the album era can already be found in the Beatles’ first two albums in 1963. The Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me, released in March 1963, already showed a different attitude towards albums. The bulk of the LP was recorded in a single marathon session, capturing the raw energy of their live Cavern sets. And while it did include both sides of their first two singles, the record as a whole feels like something the band took genuine pride in rather than a contractual obligation. The clearest evidence is in the bookends. The album opens with the high-octane McCartney original I Saw Her Standing There, and closes with their ferocious cover of Twist and Shout. Not only are they not throwaways or filler, both are iconic early Beatles tracks, energetic, memorable, and the kind of songs that, in 1963, most bands would have built entire careers or singles strategies around. By placing such strong material strictly as album tracks, the Beatles were signaling that the LP itself mattered. In a singles-dominated market, fans who only bought the 45s would miss out on genuinely great music. That created an incentive to own the full album, a subtle but important cultural shift. Nobody was routinely doing this at the time in the rock and pop sphere. As often happens with the Beatles, a comparison with the Beach Boys seems appropriate here. They released their debut album before the Beatles and their second album only days after Please Please Me. Does Brian Wilson put care into these records? Absolutely. The Beach Boys were already including plenty of original material on their albums. But they were still operating largely within the traditional singles-led model. Their biggest and most enduring songs remained the 45s. More importantly, there are no album only tracks from those early records that entered popular culture in the way I Saw Her Standing There, Twist and Shout or, later, All My Loving did. Wilson was making enjoyable and increasingly sophisticated surf albums, but he was not yet pushing the format forward in quite the same way. The Beatles were including songs that transcended their status as album tracks and became classics in their own right. 🧵