 | Concept Albums:The Top 50 |
Concept albums are collections of songs which are linked in some manner, generally thematically, to create a greater work as a whole than the individual songs. It is a format often associated with the progressive rock movement of the late ‘60s (indeed this list includes works by Genesis, Yes, and Rush), but dates back as far as Woody Guthrie’s 1940 collection Dust Bowl Ballads and has expanded to include artists outside the rock realm, such as Marvin Gaye, Willie Nelson, or Kendrick Lamar. Often a narrative (such as with Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Who’s Tommy) links the songs together to tell a story. This page highlights the top 50 concept albums of all time as determined by aggregating more than 40 best-of lists (see sources at the bottom of the page). I’ve offered a brief snapshot of each album accompanied by a link to the album’s DMDB page for even more details. Check out other best-of-genre/category lists here. |
#1. The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) |
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It is often celebrated as the first concept album although a quick perusal of this list will show there were predecessors. Still, as the #1 album of all time, Sgt. Pepper’s has reached iconic status as arguably the most influential album of all time. Conceptually, the idea was that the Beatles took on identities as an alternate band, but the theme doesn’t really extend beyond the title cut and reprise. Still, the songs make for the most cohesive sounding Beatles’ album – these songs just sound like they are meant to be played together as a whole. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#2. Pink Floyd The Wall (1979) |
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Roger Waters, the bassist and chief songwriter for Pink Floyd, was disillusioned with rock stardom and felt like a figurative wall had been built between the band and its fans. He turned that feeling of alienation into a story of a rock star being walled off from the world because of a the education system, an overbearing mother, and the trauma of losing a father in war. The protagonist’s ego becomes so overblown by fan worship that he becomes a fascist leader until his protective wall is stripped away and his still-fragile ego is exposed. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#3. The Who Tommy (1969) |
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After testing the waters with 1966’s mini-rock opera “A Quick One While He’s Away” and 1967’s concept album The Who Sell Out, The Who unleashed a full-fledged rock opera. Tommy explored powerful themes of childhood abuse and the dangers of leaders who demand unquestioned allegiance, but like many concept albums to follow, was accompanied by a sometimes head-scratching story, this time about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who becomes a pinball wizard and amasses a cult following. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#4. David Bowie The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) |
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David Bowie embraced his chameleonic nature and flare for theatrics by adopting the persona of Ziggy Stardust, an androgynous alien rock star “whose mission is to offer sex and salvation to earthlings” TL “just as the earth enters the last five years of its existence.” AD This “is the definitive glam-rock record” CQ and the artistic highpoint in Bowie’s long, storied career. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#5. Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) |
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Six years before Pink Floyd released The Wall, they were already playing with the idea of a collection of songs that were thematically linked. The Dark Side of the Moon explored the different factors that cause madness, such as “Money,” an “Us and Them” mentality or simply the ticking away of “Time.” The album has also been hailed as a psychedelic and progressive rock masterpiece that has spent more time on the Billboard album chart than any album in history. Read more at the DMDB page for this album.. |
#6. Genesis The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) |
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For Peter Gabriel’s last hurrah with Genesis, he concocted this surreal tale of Rael, a half-Puerto Rican juvenile delinquent on an odyssey through the urban squalor of New York to rescue his brother. Bandmate Phil Collins said, the story is really “about a split personality. In this context, Rael would believe he is looking for John but is actually looking for a missing part of himself.” WK Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#7. Green Day American Idiot (2004) |
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Green Day rose to fame in the mid-‘90s with their made-for-suburban-kids brand of punk rock songs that didn’t seem to take anything too seriously. When they delivered this politically-charged rock opera a decade later, it didn’t even seem like it could be the same band. However, they were still a punk band at heart, telling a tale about a misfit named St. Jimmy trying to navigate through the post-9/11 George Bush years in the United States. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#8. Jethro Tull Thick As a Brick (1972) |
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Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson said he wrote Thick As a Brick “because everyone was saying we were a progressive rock band, so we decided to live up to the reputation and write a progressive album, but done as a parody of the genre.” WK It was “a send-up of all pretentious ‘concept albums.’” The album featured just one song with dense, stream-of-conscious lyrics about an English boy’s trials growing up. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#9. The Who Quadrophenia (1973) |
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After 1969’s Tommy, The Who’s Pete Townshend initially intended to create another rock opera called Lifehouse. That project was aborted in favor of the more traditional 1971 Who’s Next album, but Townshend went right back to the rock opera format for the follow up. Quadrophenia focuses on Jimmy, an adolescent with a four-way split personality struggling to come of age in the mid-‘60s. The four personalities represented the band members while the album’s concept allowed them to explore their roots in mod culture. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#10. Marvin Gaye What’s Going On (1971) |
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In the ‘60s, Marvin Gaye established himself as “the Prince of Motown.” By 1970, however, he wasn’t interested in the label’s assembly line approach to making music. He wanted to branch out with music that made philosophical and political commentaries. He battled with Motown head honcho Berry Gordy over the new direction he wanted to take his music, eventually winning out when he proved music with a message could also sell. The album was told from the perspective of a Vietnam vet who, upon returning home, is struggling to deal with the myriad of societal issues, especially inner city life for black Americans. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#11. Queensrÿche Operation: Mindcrime (1988) |
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On their third album, progressive metal group Queensrÿche took a leap forward commercially and artistically with a story of Nikki, a drug addict who is roped into a revolutionary group as a reluctant assassin. When he falls for a prostitute turned nun and she ends up dead, he wonders if he is responsible but he loses his memory when he’s arrested and thrown in a mental institution. Read more at the DMDB page for this album. |
#12. Kendrick Lamar Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City (2012) |
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AllMusic.com said Kendrick’s major label debut “would be a milestone even without the back story.” The album is Kendrick’s “story of growing up in Compton, surrounded by gunfire, gang warfare, police brutality, drugs, liquor, dead friends.” RS’20 He had “a film director’s eye for narrative but the voice of a poet;” RS’20 this was “like a West Coast answer to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.” RS’20 Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#13. Frank Zappa Joe’s Garage (1979) |
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Originally released as two separate albums in 1979, this was later put out as a triple album box set in 1987. Joe is “an average adolescent male…who forms a garage rock band, has unsatisfying relationships with women, gives all of his money to a government-assisted and insincere religion, explores sexual activities with appliances, and is imprisoned. After being released from prison into a dystopian society in which music itself has been criminalized, he lapses into insanity” (Wikipedia). Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#14. Rush 2112 (1976) |
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On their fourth album, the Canadian rock band merged prog rock and heavy rock centered around a side-long piece that “paints a chilling picture of a future world where technology is in control.” AM The album is often categorized as a concept album because of that work although the songs on side two don’t follow that theme. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#15. The Beach Boys Pet Sounds (1966) |
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The album has been celebrated as “a pop milestone” SP and is “considered by many to be one of the most influential albums ever.” SM It really “was the first rock record that can be considered a ‘concept album,’” RS largely because it broke with the approach of the day which dictated surrounding a few hits with filler. It was a “carefully planned recording that attempted to present an album as a unified work and not merely a collection of singles.” NRR Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#16. My Chemical Romance The Black Parade (2006) |
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For their third album, the emo-punk band created an album “centered on the story of a dying man with cancer…as he nears the end of his life” (Wikipedia). It “has been revered by music journalists as one of, if not the most important album to the history of the emo music genre, as well as My Chemical Romance's defining work” and “left a significant impact on alternative culture and fashion” (Wikipedia). Read more at Wikipedia. |
#17. Iron Maiden Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988) |
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The seventh album from the English heavy metal band was inspired by Orson Scott Card’s Seventh Son novel. The band’s Steve Harris described the book as being about “this mystical figure that was supposed to have all these paranormal gifts, like second sight” (Wikipedia). Lead singer Bruce Dickinson said, “it was only half a concept album. There was no attempt to see it all the way through, like we really should have done. Seventh Son…has no story. It’s about good and evil, heaven and hell, but isn’t every Iron Maiden record?” (Wikipedia) Read more at Wikipedia. |
#18. Dream Theater Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory (1999) |
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This progressive metal band crafted this album as a sequel to “Metropolis – Part I: The Miracle and the Sleeper,” a song featured on their 1992 album Images and Words. The album follows Nicholas, “a trouble man undergoing past life regression therapy” (Wikipedia). He discovers he was a woman named Victoria in a past life who was murdered. Back in the present, Nicholas tries to solve the murder. Read more at Wikipedia. |
#19. The Kinks Village Green Preservation Society (1968) |
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This was the sixth and final album for the original lineup of the Kinks. Frontman Ray Davies was “sensing that the Beatles, Stones, and Who were radically transforming rock music by turning it literate and conceptual” RO and responded with this effort. It was “a concept album lamenting the passing of old-fashioned English traditions.” AM Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#20. Frank Sinatra In the Wee Small Hours (1955) |
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Long before bands like the Beach Boys and Beatles were hailed for making the first concept album, Frank Sinatra was making albums that were cohesive works unified by songs centered around a theme. In the Wee Small Hours is an “authoritative take on masculine loneliness” TL that is “a prototypical concept album” RS that is “considered by many to be the first concept album.” CAD Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#21. The Pretty Things S.F. Sorrow (1968) |
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S.F. Sorrow “is now recognized as the first rock-opera;” TB but it barely got noticed upon its release because the record company, EMI, didn’t know how to market the album. It “loosely tells the story of a lonely kid named [Sebastian F.] Sorrow,” PK following him “from birth to death, with love, work, war, and burning airship disasters in between.” TB It was based on a short story written by singer Phil May about World War II that featured “a central character who was an amalgam of May himself and his foster father, Charlie.” TB Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#22. Pink Floyd Animals (1977) |
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Reviewer Jason Thorpe enlisted his wife to offer analysis of the lyrics and themes of the album. She says, “Animals portrays a young man’s rage using obvious references to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. At the beginning, Waters separates himself from the barnyard animals. If we didn’t care about each other, we would be barnyard animals.” SU Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#23. Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral (1994) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#24. Sufjan Stevens Illinois (2005) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#25. Janelle Monáe The Arch Android (2010) |
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In 2007, Janelle Monáe released Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), an EP inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film classic Metropolis. The Arch Android “continues the series’ fictional tale of a messianic android” WK named Cindy Mayweather sent back in time “to liberate Metropolis from a secret society of oppressors” AM who suppress freedom and love. Monáe said the android “represents the mediator between the haves and the have-nots, the minority and the majority” WK and that “her return will mean freedom for the android community.” WK Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#26. Willie Nelson Red Headed Stranger (1975) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#27. The Who Sell Out (1967) |
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Sell Out was intended “as a concept album of sorts that would simultaneously mock and pay tribute to pirate radio stations, complete with fake jingles and commercials linking the tracks. For reasons that remain somewhat ill defined, the concept wasn’t quite driven to completion, breaking down around the middle of side two.” AM “Nonetheless…it’s a terrific set of songs that ultimately stands as one of the group’s greatest achievements.” AM Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#28. The Moody Blues Days of Future Passed (1967) |
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On only their second album, the Moody Blues delivered “with the strongest, most cohesive body of songs in their history.” AM Days succeeded because it “was refreshingly original” AM and “one of the earlier theme albums, a loose story told of a man’s journey over the course of a day (a metaphor for the course of a life).” CS The album was also pivotal in the emergence of progressive rock for its marriage of orchestral and rock music. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#29. Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here (1975) |
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Roger Waters “found his grand theme for Wish You Were Here [in] the music business…and its tendency to crush the dreams of those who pursue fame, fortune and a chance at creative self-expression.” GW It gave him leeway to explore his frustration with the band’s disintegrating camaraderie and the drug-induced mental breakdown of Syd Barrett, one of the band’s founders and its original frontman. Waters painted him as “a messianic martyr to the soulless mechanisms of the music biz.” GW Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#30. Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) |
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AllMusic.com’s William Ruhlmann says this album “helped define all the folk music that followed it.” To be such a pivotal album for a particular genre seems significant enough, but Dust Bowl Ballads also gets hailed as the birth of the concept album. Guthrie conceived of this collection of songs as a musical version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which tells the story of Okies devastated by severe droughts in the 1930s who moved to California to become migrant workers. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#31. Elton John Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#32. Beyoncé Lemonade (2016) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#33. Radiohead OK Computer (1997) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#34. Brian Wilson Smile (2004) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#35. Hüsker Dü Zen Arcade (1984) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#36. Marillion Misplaced Childhood (1985) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#37. Eagles Desperado (1973) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#38. Arcade Fire The Suburbs (2010) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#39. The Kinks Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969) |
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About the album. Read more at Wikipedia. |
#40. The Flaming Lips Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#41. Electric Light Orchestra Eldorado (1974) |
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Eldorado, the fourth album from Electric Light Orchestra, was written by bandleader Jeff Lynne “in response to criticisms from his father, a classical music lover, who said that Electric Light Orchestra's repertoire ‘had no tune.’” “The plot follows a Walter Mitty-like character who journeys into fantasy worlds via dreams, to escape the disillusionment of his mundane reality.” Read more at Wikipedia. |
#42. Yes Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) |
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Tales from Topographic Oceans is “four-piece work of symphonic length and scope (based on the Shastric scriptures, as found in a footnote within Paramahansa Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi), was their most ambitious to date. The four songs of the album symbolise (in track order) the concepts of Truth, Knowledge, Culture, and Freedom, the subjects of that section of text.” WK Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#43. XTC Skylarking (1986) |
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XTC brought on Todd Rundren to produce Skylarking and he helped “the record feel like a song cycle even if it doesn’t play like one, but what really impresses is the consistency and depth of Andy Partridge’s and Colin Moulding’s songs. Each song is a small gem, marrying sweet, catchy melodies to decidedly adult lyrical themes, from celebrations of love (Grass) and marriage (Big Day) to skepticism about maturation (Earn Enough for Us) and religion (Dear God).” AMG Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#44. Lou Reed Berlin (1973) |
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About the album. Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#45. Queens of the Stone Age Songs for the Deaf (2002) |
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About the album. Read more at Wikipedia. |
#46. Drive-By Truckers Southern Rock Opera (2001) |
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About the album. Read more at Wikipedia. |
#47. Alice Cooper Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) |
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About the album. Read more at Wikipedia. |
#48. Alan Parsons Project I Robot (1977) |
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"With its title originating from an Isaac Asimov novel, I Robot’s main concept is one that deals heavily in the field of science fiction.” MD The theme of the album is, “according to the liner notes, a meditation on ‘the rise of the machine and the decline of man.’” SS Alan Parsons uses this as his platform for voicing his “concern with the onslaught of machinery and its inevitable takeover of man, both in a physical sense and a spiritual one.” MD Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#49. Liz Phair Exile in Guyville (1993) |
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Liz Phair said in countless interviews that this album was designed, “at least tempo-wise, a song-by-song recreation” PK of “the Rolling Stones’ decadent 1972 epic, Exile on Main Street.” JD It doesn’t quite line up as “the song-by-song response Phair promoted it as” AM but “there are general similarities in the stripped-down sounds and in-your-face attitudes of the two Exiles. And whether or not you buy the link, you have to hand it to Phair for even daring to invite the comparison.” JD Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
#50. Parliament Mothership Connection (1975) |
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Funkmaster George “Clinton’s otherworldly persona and outrageous lyrics” RV combined for the ultimate concept album. BT He loads the P-Funk gang into “a spaceship and blasts off to other galaxies, where it musically interacts with societies that surely found the collective as whacked-out as we did back here on Earth.” CS Read more on the DMDB page for this album. |
