The city that keeps being declared over and keeps setting the terms.
New York is a 57-minute, lyric-first rock record built on guitar, electric upright bass, drums, and two tracks of percussion. It names real public figures and social crises without metaphor or retreat. Its power lies in its refusal to decorate its argument.
Astral Weeks is Van Morrison's second solo album, recorded in three sessions at Century Sound Studios in New York in late 1968 with a group of jazz musicians assembled by producer Lewis Merenstein. A sharp break from his pop singles, it sold modestly on release and has since been treated as one of the defining records of its era.
Recorded across three days in August 1969 at Columbia's Studio B, Bitches Brew pushed Miles Davis's turn toward electric instruments into a full, sprawling double album built from loose sketches, two bassists, up to three drummers and three electric pianists playing at once. Producer Teo Macero then spliced and looped the tapes into their final shape, a process as central to the record's identity as anything played live in the room.
Electric Ladyland is the Jimi Hendrix Experience's third and final album, a double LP recorded across New York and London studios with Hendrix credited as sole producer for the first and only time. Built from marathon takes, borrowed guests including Steve Winwood and Jack Casady, and engineer Eddie Kramer's studio experiments, it moves between blues jam, psychedelic pop and a Bob Dylan cover that outsold everything else the band released.
Produced almost entirely by RZA on a tight budget, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) turns nine distinct voices and a stack of martial-arts film samples into a single, gritty debut that reintroduced New York to the top of hip-hop.
Recorded across Manhattan studios by a teenager from Queensbridge, Illmatic sets Nas's dense, internal-rhyme narration against beats built separately by DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor and L.E.S, arriving as a compact, unhurried document of one New York housing project.
Recorded in two sessions in March and April 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, Kind of Blue found Miles Davis trading bebop's dense chord changes for loose modal sketches, handed to his sextet with barely any rehearsal. The gamble produced five tracks, from So What to Flamenco Sketches, that have shaped how musicians well outside jazz think about improvisation ever since.
Marquee Moon is Television's debut, recorded at A&R Recording in New York in November 1976 after the CBGB regulars spent years turning down record deals they judged wrong for them. Produced by frontman Tom Verlaine and engineer Andy Johns, it favours interlocking guitar lines and extended structures over the blunt riffs of the punk scene the band emerged from, and its influence on the rock guitar playing that followed has far outpaced its modest original sales.
Moondance is Van Morrison's third studio album, recorded at A&R Studios in New York in 1969 with Morrison producing for the first time in his career. Trading the loose, extended pieces of Astral Weeks for tighter songs built around a horn section, it became an immediate commercial and critical success and gave Morrison the sound he would be known for.
Made at Moby's own Manhattan studio after a career-threatening previous album, Play folds vocal hooks lifted from Alan Lomax's field recordings into electronic production, letting decades-old voices carry new songs. Slow to catch on, it eventually sold over twelve million copies largely through film and advertising licensing.
Talking Heads: 77 was recorded at Sundragon and Mediasound in New York across late 1976 and early 1977, with the newly complete four-piece working around a producer they found condescending by tracking vocals when he left the room. The result carries the tight, wiry sound of a band still finding its footing, built on a set of songs about restlessness, routine and getting a grip on your own life.
Financed by Andy Warhol and mostly recorded in four days in a Manhattan studio in 1966, this debut pairs a minimalist's drone instincts with Lou Reed's flatly reported songs about addiction and the demimonde around Warhol's circle, and sold almost nothing on release before becoming one of the most cited records in rock.
Recorded in 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, Time Out grew out of Dave Brubeck's overseas tours for the State Department, where he heard rhythms outside the usual pulse of American jazz. The Dave Brubeck Quartet built seven tracks around metres like nine-eight and five-four, including Take Five, composed by saxophonist Paul Desmond almost as an afterthought, which went on to outsell every jazz single before it.