An album can be a collection of songs, or it can be a hinge on which everything after it turns. The records that shape modern music are rarely the ones that simply sold the most; they are the ones that changed what other musicians thought was possible. After them, a genre sounds different, a production technique becomes standard, a subject that was once unspeakable becomes ordinary. Their influence is measured less in chart weeks than in the decades of work that quietly carry their fingerprints, often made by artists who were not even born when the record appeared.
Choosing six is an act of deliberate provocation, because the honest answer is that hundreds of albums have a claim. So we set ourselves a stricter test than greatness. We looked for records whose influence is broad and widely documented, that reshaped not just their own genre but the surrounding landscape, and that a working musician today would still name without hesitation. We tried to spread the picks across eras and traditions rather than crowning a single decade, because modern music is not one river but a delta, fed by many sources at once.
What follows is not a ranking of quality. You cannot meaningfully rank a jazz landmark against a hip-hop landmark, and the attempt would be silly. Think of it instead as six load-bearing walls in the house that popular music currently lives in. Remove any one and the shape of the room changes. For how these currents connect to film and print, our wider culture coverage follows the same threads across other art forms.
1. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis
Released in 1959, this is routinely cited as the best-selling and most influential jazz album ever made. Its embrace of modal improvisation gave musicians a new kind of freedom, loosening the grip of dense chord changes and opening space for melody to breathe. That cool, spacious sound seeped far beyond jazz into the wider vocabulary of modern music, and its approach is still taught, studied and quietly borrowed across genres more than six decades on.
Why it made the six: It changed how improvisation itself was conceived, and remains a common reference point across genres.
2. Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys
Brian Wilson’s 1966 studio masterwork expanded the idea of what a pop album could be, treating the recording studio as an instrument in its own right. Its layered arrangements and emotional ambition are frequently credited with pushing peers toward greater experimentation, raising the stakes for an entire generation of songwriters. It helped shift the centre of gravity in pop from the hit single toward the album as a considered, unified whole.
Why it made the six: It helped turn the pop album from a singles vehicle into a considered artistic statement.
3. What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye
Gaye’s 1971 album fused social commentary with lush, interconnected arrangements, proving that popular soul music could carry serious weight without sacrificing beauty. It reframed what a mainstream artist could say and how a record could hold together as a single continuous statement rather than a set of separate tracks. Its blend of the political and the gorgeous became a template that countless later records have reached for.
Why it made the six: It expanded the emotional and political range of popular music without sacrificing beauty.
4. The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
One of the best-selling albums in history, this 1973 record set a new bar for studio production, conceptual coherence and sonic detail. Its influence on how albums are engineered, sequenced and imagined as immersive experiences is difficult to overstate. Decades of engineers and producers have used it as a reference point for what a fully realised studio album can be, and it remains a fixture in conversations about the craft of recording.
Why it made the six: It made the fully realised, immersive studio album a benchmark others still chase.
5. Thriller by Michael Jackson
The best-selling album of all time, released in 1982, reshaped the economics and ambition of pop, blurring genre lines and setting a template for the album-as-event. Its enormous reach helped define the modern music-video era and expanded who pop music could reach and how far it could travel. Whatever your taste, its sheer cultural footprint makes it impossible to leave off a list about influence.
Why it made the six: It redrew the ceiling for what a mainstream pop record could achieve commercially and culturally.
6. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
This 1998 album drew together hip-hop, soul and reggae into a cohesive, deeply personal statement, and was widely celebrated at the time and in the years since. It helped broaden the palette of what popular music of its era could sound like, and modelled a way of moving fluidly between genres within a single, unified vision. Its confessional intimacy and musical range continue to echo through much of what has followed.
Why it made the six: It modelled a fusion of genres and confessional songwriting that echoes through much of what came after.
The Sixated take
Six albums cannot hold the whole history of modern music, and they are not meant to. What they share is leverage: each one moved the ground beneath the artists who came next, whether through a production idea, a widening of subject matter, or simply a demonstration that the bar was higher than anyone had assumed. If your curiosity is running, our culture section keeps pulling the same threads through film and print. Listen to these records in sequence and you are not hearing a greatest-hits reel; you are hearing the architecture of the present. That is the kind of listening Sixated is built to encourage: attentive, curious and unafraid of the canon.