Album #1 - 6 Mar 2026
Gimme Shelter and You Can’t Always Get What You Want are obvious highlights. Some samey blues driven tracks felt a bit like filler in the middle, but easy enough to listen to.
Album #2 - 7 Mar 2026
For the musicality, I would give this album ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
It opens strongly. “Hell’s Bells” has real dynamic range, with the tolling bell intro, the slow build, and the way the song gradually settles into its heavy groove. It feels like the record is setting up a dramatic arc.
Where it loses a star is that after that, the album largely settles into a consistent gear. AC/DC clearly have their formula: tight rhythm section, crunchy riffs, and punchy hooks. The riffs are undeniably catchy and fun, and the band executes that classic hard rock style extremely well. Still, I would have liked to hear a bit more variation across the album. Once it finds its lane, it stays there for most of the runtime.
For the lyrics, I would give it ⭐️.
I am a woman born in Sydney in 1986, so AC/DC were basically part of the musical wallpaper of my upbringing. Their songs were everywhere: pubs, parties, radio, backyard barbecues. A certain slice of Australian culture swims in this music. Because of that, I was already very familiar with the sound of Back in Black even though I had never actually sat down and listened to the record front to back until now.
Revisiting it intentionally, the lyrical themes mostly land as straightforward misogynistic objectification. I know some people read AC/DC’s lyrics as tongue-in-cheek or cartoonish rock and roll bravado. But in practice, for many listeners it is simply taken at face value.
When songs lean into themes around prostitution or women as transactional sexual objects, I do not read that as critique of women. If anything, it reads more like fragile male ego and shame projected outward. Call me a feminist, whatever.
For me, that makes the lyrical world of the album fairly uninspiring. I tend to gravitate toward music that explores something deeper, whether ideas, emotions, or stories, rather than treating women as trophies or mechanisms for satisfying male desire.
That said, I can still appreciate Back in Black as a culturally significant record. The sound is iconic and the riffs have had enormous influence. But culturally omnipresent does not necessarily mean culturally nourishing.
Overall rating: 2.5 (rounded down)
Day #3 - 8 Mar 2026
Interesting harmony choice for Round and Round.
Laid back jams, easy to listen to.
3.5
Day #4 - 9 Mar 2026
Fun listen, quite a variety of moods.
Surprised that “Ken Lee” showed up on this one 😂
3.75/5
Reggae isn’t really my thing, but I didn’t hate it.
I like psych-rock, also SOYL… THAT riff, epic.
EC has said some awful things though.
Strong album - Gloria is great. Enjoyed the journey of Land.
Can see why and how this was so influential.
Hadn’t heard any of these before. Enjoyed the guitar, especially toward the beginning of the album.
Heard some Bowie and Beatles influences.
I like Wake Up, but the rest of the album fell a bit flat for me. Shouty and loud, but not in the way I tend to enjoy.
Trolling as performance art 👏
Underwhelmed
Good voice, easy to listen to, didn’t grab me.
This album came out when I was 11 and seeped into my awareness over the course of my teenage years. I had Hail to the Thief and Amnesiac on CD, and loved (and paid voluntarily for) In Rainbows but didn’t sit down to listen to OK Computer as a full album until I was in my early thirties.
It is an astonishingly good album, and has (unfortunately for humanity in our current techsistential crisis) aged accurately in its doomy outlook on the impact of the technological revolution which was only just starting to kick off amid a fanfare of optimism in the mid 90’s
“Thinking all the ways the system will provide
Windows 95, Windows 95”
- The Smile - Zero Sum | Cutouts 2024
This is one of the albums I would have loved to have come across in chronological order because as a 80’s kid who leaned toward alternative music in my teens a lot of the sounds on this record seem like a familiar palette, so it would have been cool to hear how much it differed from the preceding sounds to get a more comprehensive understanding of how influential it was.
I really wanted to like this more than I did.
Flute is rock and roll
Liked it on first listen, loved it on second.
Never heard of him before but I can see this is a launching point for many of the moody/existential pop artistry I already love.
Smoove
Solid vibes
Yesterday when I got Songs of Leonard Cohen I joked with a friend that it belonged on a list called “1001 Albums You Must Put On For Your Dog When You Leave The House”. Well this music is literally what is played for my dog when I leave the house - several of these songs I recognise from SBS Chill digital radio station.
That said - I really enjoyed this - loads of texture and layered detail, smooth vibes.
Revolutionary, but disjointed AF.
In 2003 I was given this album on a CDR by a classmate in school as a way to try and hit on me.
Didn’t work, but the album is excellent.
Yawn
Enjoyed this a lot - glad to have been introduced to it by this challenge
Possibly the most 80’s sounding album I’ve heard.
More going on than the glossy veneer suggests.
Adele herself said in her Grammy acceptance speech that she couldn’t accept the award because she thought Beyoncé’s Lemonade should have won. Telling!
I thought I liked ELO from the songs I knew (Telephone Line, Livin’ Thing, Mr. Blue Sky, etc). But through listening to this album all I could keep thinking was “so bombastic, yet so ploddy”. And the lyrics from a song of a totally unrelated band: Dry Cleaning… “Do everything and feel nothing”.
Also I think there’s a point to be made that the most common low effort small talk is about the weather, and there’s a disc side suite dedicated to just that on this.
Pretty good production though.
Not sure why they had to record some of the songs inside a toilet cubicle.
Formative. All time great lyricist.
Reading other reviews makes me think some people should be grateful they do not “get” and resonate with the seething rage and expressed through this album.
I never really paid attention to the lyrics of Smoke on the Water before - they made me chuckle with how literal the storytelling was.
Banger riff though!
This was a popular choice for my function DJ father to play at yuppie seminars for boomers in the 90’s/early 00’s
I usually enjoy this type of music, but there was a specific distorted whirring noise through this album which was very unpleasant and caused me to get really tense.
You can’t spell “same” without S&M. And that’s what all these songs sound like.
I came across the song Starálfur when I was around 13-14 in 2000. It was recommended to me by someone on an invite only chat forum which had sprung up from people meeting online from hanging out on the Silverchair message board “Chairboard” which was a part of Chairpage (one of the first successfully implemented band websites and communities on the internet - and a great example of how the internet was intended to be, before the marketing, algorithms, global domineering technocrats ruined things).
I also came across my 24 slot Case Logic CD folder (with silver hand drawn doodles on the outside), and whaddya know, Ágætis Byrjun was one of the 29 (there were a few crammed loose in the back) albums in there, along with Sigur Ros’ next album ( )
I turn 40 next week, and this has been a mind trip through memories.
Needless to say, I loved this album, and still do.
The song cars didn’t make a lot of sense to me when I first heard it back in 2003. However now I understand where it’s coming from – unfortunately.
Fascinating and thought-provoking. I loved the album’s structure: it begins as industrial music fused with rousing militaristic fanfare, swells into rallying cries, and then gradually disintegrates into a unidimensional mechanistic slog.
To my ears it traced a path from populism to nationalism, authoritarianism and finally totalitarianism, with the human element slowly giving way to the machine.
The broader story of this band is bonkers too, and I totally get why they’re on this list.
I love NIN, so the industrial sounds and appropriation of military/political themes were familiar to me. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re struggling to get through it, I suggest you Laibach and think of Britain.
The “separate the art from the artist” argument is especially difficult with Michael Jackson because so much of his music is built around intimacy, longing and desire. Whether or not others can compartmentalise, I can’t help hearing those emotions through the lens of the allegations against him. It fundamentally changes the way the music feels, making it impossible for me to separate the performance from the person behind it.
Stars are for the work that many others contributed to the album.
Histoire de Melody Nelson is one of those albums where it’s impossible to separate the music from the story it tells. The relationship between the narrator and Melody is intentionally uncomfortable, and the age gap and power imbalance are central to that.
I’ve seen a lot of people describe the album as depicting statutory rape, but I don’t think that’s legally accurate in its historical context. Melody is described as “15 summers and 14 autumns”, indicating that she’s 15 years old. France’s age of consent is 15 today, and for much of Serge Gainsbourg’s early life it was even lower. That doesn’t make the relationship morally unproblematic, nor does it mean listeners have to be comfortable with it. It simply means there’s an important distinction between making an ethical criticism and making a legal one.
Musically, though, this album is outstanding. The arrangements are beautiful, the bass playing is superb, and its influence on later artists is easy to hear. One of my favourite albums, Beck’s Sea Change, borrows heavily from the sonic world that Melody Nelson created, and listening to this record made those connections obvious.
It’s not supposed to be comfortable listening. It’s provocative, unsettling and deliberately transgressive. Whether you admire it or reject it on those grounds is a personal decision, but its musical influence and craftsmanship are undeniable.
