Top 10 Albums Turning 50 in 2025

Published on 09 January 2025

8 Minute Read

 

The Seventies. When Rock ruled the earth, and its practitioners were giants among the populace. 

1975, before punk changed the rules. After the Hippy dream vapourised. The age of the rock star. The British Invasion had left its mark, as had Prog, and rock music was the musical currency of the world.

I’m being a bit selective here of course, but when you see the awesome records on this list, I think you’ll be inclined to agree with me. Every year has its classic, timeless music, but 1975 was a bit special, and with the sobering/horrifying thought that this all happened HALF A CENTURY AGO, please let me move straight onto my specially curated, carefully prepared, entirely subjective list of the best albums turning 50 years young in 2025…

 

The Albums at a Glance

Physical Graffiti - Led Zeppelin

Young Americans - David Bowie

High Voltage - AC/DC

ABBA - ABBA 

Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan

Night at the Opera - Queen

Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac

Metal Machine Music - Lou Reed

Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band 

Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd 

 

Physical Graffiti - Led Zeppelin

Where does this behemoth sit in your own personal ‘best Led Zep albums’ list? For me, it’s top three for sure, and it’s not just for Kashmir! I’d humbly offer up In My Time of Dying as being John Bonham’s greatest drum perfromance ever, and I’d point to The Wanton Song and The Rover for Grade A Jimmy Page riffs.

I don’t know how justified I can be in saying that this is an ‘underrated’ record since it's world famous, but people don’t seem to mention it with the same breathlessness that’s reserved for IV and the rest. A landmark hard rock record.

 

Young Americans - David Bowie

It’s quite eyebrow-raising when you stop to consider David Bowie’s 70s output. I’m actually going to do you a quick list, just so you can see how much he rammed into this one decade, with a notable song in brackets from each record:

  • 1970: The Man Who Sold the World (The Man Who Sold the World)
  • 1971: Hunky Dory (Life on Mars?, Changes)
  • 1972: Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars (loads, inc the title track, Moonage Daydream and Lady Stardust)
  • 1973: Aladdin Sane (title track, Panic in Detroit, Jean Genie, Drive-In Saturday)
  • 1973: Pin Ups (covers album, included Sorrow)
  • 1974: Diamond Dogs (Sweet Thing, Rebel Rebel)
  • 1975: Young Americans (Young Americans, Fame (with John Lennon))
  • 1976: Station to Station (Wild is the Wind, Golden Years)
  • 1977: Low (Sound and Vision, Be My Wife)
  • 1977: “Heroes” (“Heroes”, Beauty and the Beast, Secret Life of Arabia)
  • 1979: Lodger (DJ, Look Back in Anger)
  • 1980: Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (Ashes to Ashes, Fashion)

What, nothing in 1978? What a lazy git!

All joking aside, that’s a clearly incomparable body of work: a veritable treasure chest of tunes, styles, atmospheres and grooves. Most careers have nothing like that level of consistent quality, and that was only one decade out of David’s 50+ years as a musician.

Young Americans stands out as his lone take on soul music (he called it ‘plastic soul’ as he felt like an interloper) but it made him the first ever white artist to perform on the Soul Train TV show. This was less than two years after Aladdin Sane, remember! With Diamond Dogs (an underrated masterpiece) in between!

It’s true: we really are not worthy.

 

High Voltage - AC/DC

It’s weird to think that there was a time when AC/DC didn’t exist, isn’t it?

Some fans may correctly point out that this debut record of theirs wasn’t released until 1976, but I’d parry that sneaky attack with this for a counter-move: High Voltage was originally released in 1975 in Australia and New Zealand! The rest of the world caught up a year later, and Acka-dacka actually knocked out a second album before this one saw release over here. Good work ethic there, boys: almost as busy as Bowie there!

High Voltage is an album you already know backwards, so let me save the hyperbole and just choose a classic banger from it, to be played loud with optional air guitar. Embrace the cringe!

 

ABBA - ABBA 

You can’t deny it. You cannot deny the quality of songs from this Swedish pop powerhouse. ABBA wrote songs that will survive for as long as there are human beings, so universal are they in their appeal.

This self-titled album - actually their third longplayer - contained its own handful of stone cold stunners in the form of SOS and Mamma Mia. Now, here’s something: when was the last time you stuck on an ABBA album that wasn’t ABBA Gold? Yes, never? Ok, start with this one!

 

Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan

The new Dylan biopic is soon for the cinemas, and ears will no doubt be turning towards this legend’s prodigious output (850 albums since the 60s…okay, 40 studio albums, 21 live albums, 17 ‘Bootleg’ albums and then compilations etc). Blood on the Tracks will turn 50 this year, and coincidentally, it’s overwhelmingly renowned as his greatest studio record. It’s his 15th album and perhaps best demonstrates his more personal, autobiographical writing style, even if he denies it!

 

Night at the Opera - Queen

All I really need to put here is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody is on this’, in order to justify its greatness. That said, there was always far more to Queen than that (admittedly stupifying) tune, and A Night at the Opera is one of their better overall albums.

Is it fair to say that even though Queen were quite obviously magnificent, that some of their output was…uneven? That some of it ‘fell a bit short’ compared with other examples? This album, though, offered up gems like ‘You’re My Best Friend’ in between bonkers reworkings of the English national anthem and (not kidding) pirate sea shanties. Eclectic? You could say so!

 

Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac

Hit machines & drama makers Fleetwood Mac are usually never short of a smash song or two, and this 1975 self-titled record doesn’t drop the baton. It seems like Stevie Nicks may have dominated the writing proceedings here (no bad thing) with notable tunes being Rhiannon and Landslide

Just like Queen though, this was a band full of strong songwriters, so there’s plenty of variety here. It seems their key has been to always out-write their life dramas: the soap opera stuff behind the scenes never outshone great song after great song, and so it remains.

 

Metal Machine Music - Lou Reed

If you’ve ever wondered what an hour-and-a-half-huff of Lou Reed’s would sound like put to music, 1975’s Metal Machine Music should satisfy your curiosity forever.It’s a famously unlistenable record, made intentionally that way by the permafrosty Reed to answer his unappreciative label, critics and fanbase, and it genuinely almost killed his career. Was the sneer worth it?

To be clear, there are no songs, no verses or choruses, no melodies and no rhythms at all for the entirety of the album. People complain that it’s ‘a bunch of mad guitar feedback’ because that’s precisely what it is.

That’s all it is.

It’s the ultimate of ‘trolls’ to some people, as if Lou were actually daring his audience to hear the value of it, rather like pretending to ‘get’ contemporary art etc.

Have you listened to Metal Machine Music? I did, recently (and not for this blog, either) and it could be my modern post-Sunn0))) ears of whatever, but for about ten minutes it’s actually quite thrilling.

I’m not recommending you rush out and buy it though, okay?

 

Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band 

The record that truly earned Bruce his nickname of ‘The Boss’, Born to Run brought together his wide-eyed romance and optimism, mixed it with a dash of his oncoming world-weariness, and added a huge dollop of arranging and orchestration that landed the final record somewhere in between Phil Spector and Meatloaf.

Born to Run is a big record in every way: the ambition, the viewpoint, the scope, the sound and the performances. It’s a giant of an album, and most of The Boss’s subsequent output would - and still does - get compared to this. If every album had a Born to Run and Thunder Road on them, the world would be an infinitely better place.

 

Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd 

Another entry in this list, another landmark album from 1975. Pink Floyd have always been an accessible yet unpredictable band, and this follow up to the gajillion-selling Dark Side of the Moon showed many new facets to the complex jewel that is The Floyd. 

Wish You Were Here is a timeless and unanimously loved acoustic singalong that hides some surprisingly sharp lyrics, whilst Shine on You Crazy Diamond (all 9 progtastic, roman-numerically ordered parts of it) displays the band at their most languid, mystical and profligate. 

Both are masterpieces of course, and for entirely different reasons. How many bands could score an obvious radio hit and an extended prog odyssey on the same album? It’s crazy to even consider it, but for Gilmour, Waters, Mason and Wright, it was just another day in the studio.

 

Not a Bad Year After All

Imagine having music of that level coming out every year? They just didn’t know how good they had it, them lot back in 1975. And that was only ten records out of the thousands that were released! I deliberately went for the big-hitters, because why not? Things changed quickly enough in the years that followed, but 1975 was a vintage age for guitar music. The fact that we are all still listening to all of this music speaks for itself!

Did I miss a favourite of yours? Are you angry that I swerved Rush and some other enormo-bands (Journey, KISS, Aerosmith etc)? I do apologise, and if I decide to extend this to a top 20, I assure you they’ll be in there, but this list seems pretty much solid gold to me as it is! 

What a year 1975 was! Will it be beaten, fifty years later?

Only time will tell…

 

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Ray

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I'm a musician and artist originally from the South West coast of Scotland. I studied Visual Arts and Film Studies at...

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