Top 20 Debut Albums of All Time
Published on 16 July 2024
How many of the best albums in the world are debuts?
Quite a lot of them, it seems!
Some bands take a few records to fully develop their style and sound, whilst others come out of the gates as fully formed as they’ll ever be. Some bands last for decades; others combust after one or two definitive statements. There are no rules, and no recipes for success…
Today, I’ve put together a pretty strong list of 20 of the best debut albums ever. I’ve got rock, rap, indie, metal and more on here, and the only two things linking them is their debut status and phenomenal quality.
Check out the list below, and definitely make a note of any record that you are not intimately familiar with: these are essential listens! Enjoy the tunes!
The Band - Music from Big Pink
Bob Dylan was onto something when he hired these guys to be his backing band. These semi-mythical musicians almost single handedly invented Americana - a fresh yet old-fashioned blend of folk, country, blues & funk - with their first record, Music from Big Pink.
The record got its name from the place they recorded in, which was the basement of a large pink house in Woodstock. The band would write, jam and record whilst on breaks from backing Dylan on tour. The Band - named after how they were spoken of by locals in the neighbourhood - created a body of work that remains unrivalled in the genre, but their first set of songs are arguably their best.
Nirvana - Bleach
Seattle’s finest came to worldwide fame and adulation with album number two, but their ferocious debut is a potent collection of buzzing, riffy rock that deserves its own place in the pantheon.
Notably more metal influenced than their later work, Bleach saw Nirvana outline the blueprint of their sound: scuzzy riffs, sandpaper vocals and thunderous drums that pound around loping, addictive basslines. The best was perhaps yet to come, but for promising starts, they don’t come much better than this.
Guns ‘n’ Roses - Appetite for Destruction
Guns ‘n’ Roses were a heavily hyped band long before their debut record was released. The buzz was based mostly around their image and live performances, and so expectations were suitably high for these upstarts from the wrong side of the Los Angeles freeway.
Once Appetite for Destruction came out, though, the hype was more than justified by the songs onboard. You can tell how influential this record was by how quickly other bands started to sound like it!
The Doors - The Doors
Another LA band but from a different era, The Doors were one of those bands who stuck out from the crowd in an excellent way. Most of the attention went to vocalist Jim Morrison, but each of the other members - Ray Manzarek on keys, Robby Krieger on guitar and John Densmuir on drums - were not only high quality players, but musicians with character and imagination to spare.
The Doors’ debut has a number of their best songs on it, from the rabble-rousing Break on Through to the romantic ballad Crystal Ship and number two hit Light My Fire. It also had The End, a complex epic with poetry, drama and the controversial ‘killer awoke before dawn’ segment. Francis Ford Coppola used it in his movie Apocalypse Now, only furthering the legend.
Ramones - Ramones
You can argue all day long about what is punk and what isn’t, but as far as I’m concerned, the Ramones’ debut record was Year Zero for punk music. The directness, the simplicity, the grinding sound of the band mixed with pure melody…it’s punk pop perfection.
The Ramones is one of those records that you need to stick on every once in a while to just remind yourself of how great that musical moment in time was.
Van Halen - Van Halen
We talk a lot about Van Halen here at guitarguitar, but that’s partly because they - and their debut album in particular - caused such seismic shifts in the guitar community.
I could go on and on about Eddie’s world-changing playing, but the fact is, it wouldn’t mean half as much were it not attached to some top quality tunes! Van Halen were always a band that were more than the sum of their considerable parts, and the energy and sheer vibe on their first album was pretty much the best possible advert for their live show. 46 years on, it’s lost none of its magic.
The Smiths - The Smiths
The Smiths seemingly arrived as a fully formed concept and entity in 1984. A highly idiosyncratic sounding band with an instantly iconic - and iconoclastic - frontman, The Smiths wasted no time in bringing the world their curiously retro, particularly melodic form of guitar pop.
Seemingly living in both the 80s and the 50s, they were like a cerebral band from another dimension, though Morrissey’s sharp lyrics focussed on the mundane and the everyday like nobody ever before.
It wasn’t to last, but there was more greatness ahead at least.
R.E.M. - Murmur
On the other side of the Atlantic, another jangly indie band were making mystical, rural rock music and inadvertently created the whole genre of college rock. R.E.M. hailed from Athens, Georgia and filled their music with echoes, subterfuge and literary allusions, all blended in with innovative percussion and complex three-part vocal harmonies.
Murmur remains their most mysterious record, and boasts several classic R.E.M. singles and deep cuts such as Perfect Circle, Radio Free Europe and Pilgrimage.
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin
Is this the most influential rock debut ever? It may well be, given how ubiquitous Led Zeppelin’s sound became. Before them, though, there was no such sound in existence until Robert Plant and John Bonham headed to London to join session aces Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones in their new band.
Initially called the New Yardbirds, this foursome unleashed some of the most charged-up, thunderous rock music the world had ever heard. They also blended it all with a folk influence that felt measured and appropriate, rather than tacked on. This gave their songs a third dimension that proved to later become the very blueprint for guitar-based rock bands of the next 50 years.
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
Both Joy Division and New Order - the band that Joy Division became after singer Ian Curtis’ suicide - had a policy of not putting any singles onto their albums. This makes it a little bit strange 40 years later, when you listen to both Joy Division records and yet never hear Love Will Tear Us Apart, Atmosphere or Dead Souls.
Strange but exciting, and also very rewarding when, instead of said missing singles, you’re instead given a cohesive group of songs that share a uniquely spectral, otherworldly ambience. Unknown Pleasures is something of a slow burn, but there’s a huge payoff involved for a little persistence, because amongst the gloom and nihilism is a whole new language of sound and production that was like nothing else in the world at its time.
Straight Outta Compton - NWA
This landmark hip hop record was released a full four years before the Rodney King incident and subsequent LA riots, and never has there been such a defining statement of intent. Straight Outta Compton was the sound of South Central Los Angeles, reported directly by those who lived there.
Instead of being an intense listen, Straight Outta Compton is invigorating and energised, meshing cutting edge (for the time) production from Dr Dre with a hat trick of furious, superlative rapping from Ice Cube, MC Ren and Easy E.
Whether you buy into the more ‘gangster’ element of the album’s narrative or not, it spoke with an authentic and confident collective voice, and in both Express Yourself and the title track itself, provided the hip hop genre with some of its most enduring classics.
Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
They are perhaps the most influential heavy rock/metal band of them all, and it all started with the first record. From the beguilingly beautiful/eerie front cover, to the supernatural terror of songs like the title track (put your mind in the perspective of someone from the pre-Exocrist/Omen early 1970s and it’s a genuinely unnerving listen), this was one unholy record!
Were Black Sabbath satanists? Well, no (two of them at least were devout Catholics) but the darkness, horror and menace alluded to on this debut album defined not only their career and influence, but also spawned whole genres like Doom metal.
Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
It’s annoying to say, but this record’s rants against establishment and the unfairness of life when you’re not in the 1% are, if anything, more relevant now than they were in 1977 when the Sex Pistols unleashed this on the world.
It’s also probably hard to understand the seismic shift that occurred throughout the young and the disenchanted when they first heard these molten songs. If they sound urgent and vital now, how must they have appeared to a world that had never before experienced them?
It’s easy to think of the more ‘pantomime’ elements of the Sex Pistols, but stick on the record and you get none of that; you just get the unmitigated ferocity.
Oasis - Definitely Maybe
Musical magpies they may have been, but those warring Gallagher brothers certainly knew how to pen brash, catchy anthems. Definitely Maybe is one of those albums that sounds like a Best Of because every song on it is both essential and perfectly sequenced.
The sound - like the Sex Pistols covering the Beatles - is a pretty wise move, whether deliberate or otherwise: it’s easy to forget just how big and noisy Oasis sounded in the early years.
The follow up record (What’s the Story) Morning Glory elevated them to superstar status, but their debut is the better record.
Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced?
Did this otherworldly masterpiece sound as strange back in 1967 as it does now? It’s not as if it was indicative of the music of the era, even though it quickly came to define it.
It’s obviously impossible to overstate Hendrix’s humongous influence on pretty much all styles of rock music since: we all still listen to his music and talk about him, after all!
What’s not perhaps expressed as often is how inventive and colourful his songwriting was, and this is demonstrated perfectly on Are You Experienced?. From the beautiful fantasy of May This Be Love to the astral wanderings of Third Stone from the Sun, there are whole worlds to visit here, all painted with sound and original ideas.
Machine Head - Burn My Eyes
Machine Head really shook things up in the mid 90s when they collided with the metal scene. There was a distinct sense of ‘difference’ in how they sounded and what they played, even though their music was littered with references. It felt fresh, raw and exciting, igniting a touchstrip for the genre that continued to be felt for many years afterwards.
Burn My Eyes dispensed with metal’s preoccupation with dragons and satan, instead confronting issues like the Waco disaster, for example. Like Sepultura, they saw heavy music as a potent weapon of change, and pursued that idea with vigour and invention. Plus, they totally put the 5150 on the map as the metal amp for a new generation.
Machine Head have probably created at least three all time classic metal albums, but the regularity with which this one is addressed by subsequent generations confirm its status as a prime mosh moment indeed.
Stone Roses - Stone Roses
It’s rare for the worlds of indie rock and club music to mesh so well, but the Stone Roses did exactly that without really playing either style.
Really, the debut album sounds more like the Smiths played in some ecstatic, colourful parallel world filled with breathless vocals and chiming guitars. Clubbers loved it, indie fans loved it, and the world briefly felt like it was shifting in a more united way.
The Stone Roses came out of the Manchester 80s scene that formed around New Order’s Hacienda club, and were actually around for a number of years before their debut was released in 1989. Interestingly, for such a loved and revered record, it wasn’t an instant success, and in fact took some years for its value to be fully recognised. Nowadays, of course, it's rightly seen as one of the greatest debut albums ever.
Pearl Jam - Ten
Grunge bands have had a sad history of losing members, but Pearl Jam have proven resilient. That said, their core nucleus of members were previously in Mother Love Bone until their vocalist died and the members regrouped as Pearl Jam with Eddie Vedder taking over.
That may explain why debut record Ten is so strong: the band already had plenty of experience together. But still, Ten was a vital and energetic statement and featured a very strong collection of songs that addressed non-standard topics for the time: Jeremy was about a teenage suicide, Even Flow is about being homeless and Alive (with surely one of grunge’s best choruses?) dealt with a sketchy (fictional) story of incenst.
Still, it rocks hard and has dynamics and melodies far beyond more of their grunge peers. It remains a classic rock album.
King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King
Even in the mind-expanding late 60s, this record is pretty out there. In a wonderful way, I’d add, and in such a unique manner that hardly anything since (including Crimson’s own music) has sounded quite like it.
It’s an epic, ‘other’, mystical and slightly hostile vista that this album sits upon, with cathedrals of mellotron and woodwind. The album goes some distance beyond its rock, classical and jazz influences, into another style of music completely. For anyone looking for an ‘outside the box’ sound that is still accessible, this record is a pretty amazing journey, and even more so when you consider that it’s a debut.
Jeff Buckley - Grace
Jeff Buckley left the world just as his career was taking off, leaving behind only one full album and a brace of demos for another.
It’s a testament to that album - Grace - that it has been enough to establish Buckley’s legend ever since. Yes, it was famous for its well chosen covers - Lilac Wine for my money is better than Hallelujah - but it’s for his own compositions that he’ll hopefully be best remembered.
A wonderful guitarist with a unique ear for chord voicings, Jeff was also blessed with a spectacular singing voice, and that combination proved to be too potent to fall into obscurity. His relatively polished demo tracks (gathered together as the album Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk) give an indication of where his next moves were roughly headed, but we’ll never truly know. That said, most artists never create albums like Grace at all, never mind as their first albums.
Honourable Mentions
There are always more choices that haven’t quite made the cut for a top 20, and so this final space is reserved for shouting out other great debuts. Here we go:
- Licensed to Ill - Beastie Boys
- Pretty Hate Machine - Nine Inch Nails
- Illmatic - Nas
- Kill ‘Em All - Metallica
- Endtroducing - DJ Shadow
- My Generation - The Who
- Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine
- Mr Tambourine Man - The Byrds
- Boy - U2
- The Stooges - The Stooges
- Piper at the Gates of Dawn - Pink Floyd
- Velvet Underground & Nico - Velvet Underground & Nico
Did I miss any classics? I hope I’ve covered most of them for you, and I hope you enjoyed re-acquainting yourself with these amazing debut albums!
