Rock music often goes big, and that immensity of the genre is one of the best reasons to listen to it. Lots of good rock sounds great loud and mines a lot of emotion out of things lyrically, though the genre is versatile, so you can get rock albums that are moodier. Some of the best albums mix things up and pace everything well, so you go from feeling hyped to feeling miserable and then back again, on and on, for a dozen or so tracks.
Or maybe less than a dozen tracks, because the songs are all very long. Keeping things interesting when each song is around 10 minutes is another kind of ambition. Anyway, for those reasons, or maybe some others, the following rock albums stand out as the most ambitious of all time (with a limit of one album per artist).
10
‘OK Computer’ (1997)
Radiohead
Get used to statements along the lines of “This band/artist used to be one way, but then x album showed previously unrealized depths.” It’s one way to appreciate ambition, if you have an older and simpler album to compare things to. And it happened with Radiohead and where the band was at when they released OK Computer, which built on and expanded the sound of The Bends (their second album), which itself was a real expansion of the band’s debut, Pablo Honey.
Yes, Pablo Honey is the one with “Creep,” for better or worse. OK Computer, though, is the one where just about every song is great, and then when you have them all together, they make for one stunning whole (to be fair, listening to the album in full is needed if you want “Fitter Happier” to work at all… but the other songs, on their own, are excellent). OK Computer is also one of those fabled concept albums that manages to deal with “life” as its concept, mostly just all the anxieties and miseries associated with living it near the end of the 20th century. Kid A might well have been even more ambitious, but it feels a bit weird to call that one a “rock” album, with how electronics-focused it is, so OK Computer is going here instead.
9
‘Physical Graffiti’ (1975)
Led Zeppelin
If you’re talking quality, then Led Zeppelin probably peaked with their fourth album (which was untitled, but can be referred to as Led Zeppelin IV for hopefully obvious reasons). But if you’re talking immensity, then Physical Graffiti has it beat, which is no small task, given Led Zeppelin IV did a lot within the confines of eight songs and a single album.
Physical Graffiti had more room to play around with, since it was a double album… but not a huge number of tracks here, meaning there’s a pretty long average length per song (approximately five and a half minutes). There’s some of Led Zeppelin’s best material here, and honestly, a bit of filler, yet it still works well for the most part, and does indeed give you the “most” out of any of the band’s studio albums. If 83 minutes isn’t enough for you, there is always the live album How the West Was Won, with a couple of tracks exceeding 20 minutes, and a version of “Moby Dick,” which is mostly a drum solo and it goes for about 19 minutes.
8
‘Blonde on Blonde’ (1966)
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan got a bit more playful with Blonde on Blonde (which can be abbreviated to B.o.B, after all), compared to some of his previous albums, which had been a bit more focused on social and political issues. Okay, maybe it started more with Highway 61 Revisited, or even Bringing It All Back Home, as they walked so Blonde on Blonde could run, and then Blonde on Blonde ended up running, like, an entire marathon.
See, Blonde on Blonde is long. By double album standards, it’s not monstrously long, since double albums released on vinyl can be around 80 minutes (Physical Graffiti was, for instance), but nearly 73 minutes is still quite a lot, and Dylan did the whole double album thing here before it was cool. Blonde on Blonde wasn’t literally the first double album, but it was definitely one of the first if you’re talking rock albums.
7
‘Outside’ (1995)
David Bowie
There are plenty of David Bowie albums that are better than Outside, including the bulk of what the artist did during a rather shockingly packed 1970s. Yet Outside could well be his most ambitious album, with part of that coming down to the length, seeing as it clocks in at about 75 minutes, making it easily the longest of Bowie’s studio albums.
Also, some of the ambition here was a bit too much, in the sense that Outside was intended to be the first release in a series of concept albums, but that never ended up happening. So, the narrative you get here (which really bogs down some parts of the album) was left unfinished. Still, Outside has its moments (namely, “Hallo Spaceboy,” “I’m Deranged,” and “Strangers When We Meet”), and what it was going for can certainly be admired, to some extent.
6
‘American Idiot’ (2004)
Green Day
It’s sobering to think about American Idiot being more than 20 years old. Acknowledging how sobering it feels will look ridiculous come 2034, when it’s 30 years old, and then 2044, when it’s 40, and so on. But still, what an album for its time, and in most ways, it still holds up. It saw Green Day expanding their sound to some extent, but more focused on expanding what they were willing to do within a single album.
American Idiot does contain a couple of incredibly long songs, which clashes with most pop punk/rock, where it’s usually the punchier/shorter the song, the better.
The sound here doesn’t add much instrumentation or anything beyond what Green Day were known for, but American Idiot does contain a couple of incredibly long songs, which clashes with most pop punk/rock, where it’s usually the punchier/shorter the song, the better. American Idiot’s title track is punchy and punky, as are other songs here, which makes epics like “Jesus of Suburbia” stand out all the more. And then what American Idiot went for socially/thematically/narratively proved to be a big step forward for Green Day as a band, too.
5
‘Quadrophenia’ (1973)
The Who
Tommy was the first album that suggested The Who were really willing to do something huge and conceptual, so that does feel worthy of an honorable mention. It came before Quadrophenia, though Quadrophenia is the stronger selection of songs overall, and it’s a thematically more interesting concept album than Tommy. Tommy does have a more comprehensible narrative, but that’s not everything.
It’s something, sure. And it was especially something in 1969, in terms of furthering the idea of a concept album and what exactly such a thing could do. Quadrophenia’s songs, though… it just comes down to the songs. They all sound so good. Sorry if that’s not very interesting commentary. Listen to the album. That’s the commentary; that’s the takeaway from all this. Quadrophenia is even more worthy of your time than either Tommy or (the also excellent) Who’s Next.
4
‘The Wall’ (1979)
Pink Floyd
There are some individual songs from The Wall that are highlights, but for the most part, when people talk about The Wall, they’re talking about the entire thing. The concept of this concept album is particularly strong, so it’s about the concept-iest a concept album has ever concepted. It’s about a musician with a traumatic past letting all sorts of things tear his life apart further, and so he builds a metaphorical and emotional (and also possibly literal?) wall around himself.
You do get it straight away, and so that might make it sound like it all runs the risk of being too obvious, but there is more nuance to it, and also different ways to experience what’s being offered here narratively (like the 1982 film, Pink Floyd: The Wall). It does live up to the hype, though there are Pink Floyd albums that are arguably even better, just not as big, and thereby potentially not as ambitious.
3
‘Use Your Illusion’ (1991)
Guns N’ Roses
See, if this was all about quality, it probably wouldn’t feel right to mention Use Your Illusion. It’s an inconsistent album… if it’s even right to consider it as one album. This might be cheating, but there was a Use Your Illusion I and a Use Your Illusion II that both came out on the same day. It’s probably like counting those four upcoming Beatles movies as one movie, even if the plan there is for four individual movies to come out on the one day.
So, if Use Your Illusion is one massive “thing,” then it’s almost as ambitious as rock albums have ever gotten. Guns N’ Roses went bigger here without necessarily getting better, if you want to compare it to the leaner and far more consistent Appetite for Destruction. This is all assuming Chinese Democracy shouldn’t be taking this place, though. That album’s infamous for how much it cost, and for how long it took to come out, so that arguably represents uncompromising ambition in another way.
2
‘Sandinista’ (1980)
The Clash
Calling Sandinista a rock album is misrepresenting it, since it feels like a pretty bold attempt on the part of The Clash to do an album that dips its toes into just about every genre it can, at least once. The one album that’s going to place ahead of it does something similar, but does it a little better. Still, not putting Sandinista ahead of it… well, it was a hard call. Sandinista is similarly eclectic and does that eclectic thing for longer.
See, it’s a triple album. Rather than having 15 to 20 songs and a total duration of 70 to 80 minutes, Sandinista is made up of 36 songs, and its total length is only a few minutes shy of two and a half hours. The whole thing is wild with how inconsistent it is, too, having some of The Clash’s best and worst songs all intermingling, proving to be an absolute endurance test to get through in one sitting.
1
‘The Beatles’ (1968)
The Beatles
12 years before The Clash did an album that was a bit of everything, The Beatles did as well, doing so across 30 tracks and a bit over 90 minutes. They did it on an album called The Beatles, but sometimes dubbed The White Album, because that feels a little easier to refer to (or at least it was, until Weezer themselves did their own White Album in 2017… for what it’s worth, it’s actually pretty good).
As with Sandinista, there’s a good deal of experimentation in this self-titled album by The Beatles, and an admirable attempt to explore as many genres as possible. This gets weird and occasionally frustrating, but it’s surprisingly consistent considering its length, and some of the harder-to-enjoy tracks are honestly fascinating for other reasons, making their easiness on the ear – or lack thereof – not so important (mostly just looking at you, “Revolution 9”).