20 Essential Track 1s

What makes a great album opener? It’s a question that becomes increasingly irrelevant with each passing year, as the music world sinks deeper into algorithm-dominated streaming playlists, and listeners settle into more passive habits. Yet for a dedicated minority of music fans, the album remains the primary medium to experience and present a collection of songs. It’s a cohesive statement, placing a well-sequenced order of tracks on the same artistic plane as a great novel or film. For these enthusiasts (myself included), the album represents the highest aspirations of music as an art form, and every great album needs a great opener.

While album openers aren’t always the best song on a record, they hold an outsized importance. They introduce the artist’s vision and invite listeners to stick around for the journey ahead. A weak opener can give the listener an easy opportunity to abandon ship, and perhaps miss out on an otherwise excellent batch of tunes. 

Though all album openers share a common goal, they often choose different approaches to achieve them. Here, I’ve highlighted a few recurring categories that some of my favorite album openers fall into, and I’ll be ranking the top five tracks in each of these categories.

Category I: The Mission Statement

The Mission Statement opener serves as a condensed preview of an album’s themes, style, and sonic identity. These types of openers are often found on debut albums, and often set the tone for not just the record itself, but the artist’s entire career.

5 “Tellin’ Lies” – The Menzingers (from After the Party, 2017)

Music across genres often glamorizes the ecstasy of adolescence, but somewhat less explored, and decidedly less sexy, are the stories of getting older and teetering on the edge of giving up your dreams for a more stable life. Few artists have explored these themes with as much precision—or as many catchy hooks—as The Menzingers on their 2017 album After the Party. Opening track, “Tellin’ Lies” encapsulates the album’s central theme with gorgeous simplicity in the line, “Where we gonna go now that our twenties are over?” which launches the song’s anthemic chorus. 

Over huge guitars and self-referential lyrics, “Tellin’ Lies” beautifully describes both the crippling anxiety of aging, and the dogged determination to keep fighting for the things you love. The bridge pulls the energy back down to earth, offering blissfully, nostalgic renderings of your twenties juxtaposed with the humbling lessons that don’t often hit until your thirties. As the song closes, co-frontman Greg Barnett repeats “Is it wrong to say that things can change?”​​—a question After the Party spends the rest of its duration trying to answer.

4 “The Future” – Leonard Cohen (from The Future, 1992)

For Leonard Cohen, songwriting was often a tortuous process. A well-known story recounts Bob Dylan asking the Canadian legend how long it took to write “Hallelujah”. Cohen lied and said two years—it actually took five. A similarly arduous process went into crafting the title track for his ninth studio album, The Future. But the result of that labor is a masterful, grim, and sardonic song that sets the tone for Cohen’s album-long odyssey to find meaning in the turbulence of the post-Cold War era.

From the punchy, lounge organ groove that ignites the song, to Cohen’s guttural baritone singing about crack and anal sex, “The Future” sounds light years removed from the pensive, acoustic folk of his early albums. Yet the composite of sonic elements creates a fitting canvas for the singer’s eerily prophetic lyrics. Drum machines, smooth jazz bass lines, gospel harmonies enveloping Cohen’s gravelly vocals, and a minor-key tonality come together to evoke the chaotic, tasteless world he envisions. There are few lyrics as chilling and definitive of an album’s tone than Cohen’s stark declaration: “I’ve seen the future, brother—it is murder.”

Amid all the allusions to end times, the horrors of the twentieth century, the erosion of privacy and objective truth, Cohen still finds a glimmer of hope in love, which he hails as the “only engine of survival”. Whether that love is romantic, sexual, or spiritual in nature might be irrelevant to Cohen, who, through his body of work, suggests their synonymy. This infusion of hope gives the song a flicker of optimism, previewing the brighter tones that appear on later tracks, especially the beautiful “Anthem.” A work of extraordinary musicality and lyrical depth, “The Future” serves as a bold manifesto for one of the finest albums of Cohen’s career.

3 “All I Really Want” – Alanis Morissette (from Jagged Little Pill, 1995)

While “You Oughta Know,” the second track on Jagged Little Pill, is often seen as the album’s defining statement, “All I Really Want,” which precedes it, better captures the core themes of Alanis Morissette’s 1995 breakthrough. The song paints her world in more nuanced, vibrant hues than the reductive “Angry Young Woman” label imposed by male rock critics of the ’90s would suggest. “All I Really Want” establishes Alanis as a seeker, a sophisticated thinker, and a sharp deconstructor of relationships. Musically, the song’s patient tempo, repetitive chord structure, and swirling rush of harmonica and wah wah-ed guitar feel like Alanis gently taking you by the hand and guiding you into the raw, wondrous world of Jagged Little Pill.

2 “Bring da Ruckus” – Wu-Tang Clan (from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), 1993)

Great opening tracks on hip-hop albums are often pushed to the second slot to make room for intro skits that often serve little purpose beyond padding the runtime. One of the most notable exceptions is “Bring da Ruckus” from Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album—a track that stands as the best mission statement in rap history.

After a brief sample of dialogue from the 1983 Hong Kong martial arts film, Shaolin and Wu Tang, the Clan dives straight in, with the group’s mastermind, RZA, shouting “bring the motherfuckin’ ruckus” at full blast. It’s the perfect battle cry for a group that arrived fully formed, ready to unleash their unique blend of grimy beats, eerie soul samples, kung fu mysticism, superhero bravado, and raw chronicles of street life.

The rest of “Bring da Ruckus” is a furious transmission of grit and elegance, with the group’s cadre of MCs laying down a blueprint not only for the rest of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) but for the entirety of their career as a collective. While every Wu-Tang song is worth hearing, if you only listened to “Bring da Ruckus,” you’d still grasp exactly what makes this group such a groundbreaking force in hip-hop—and why they remain so beloved by their legions of fans.

1 “Rock n’ Roll Star” – Oasis (from Definitely Maybe, 1994)

Ah, Oasis. Rarely has a band sounded so brash, confident, and desperate right from the outset. The first song on Oasis’ classic debut album, Definitely Maybe, “Rock n’ Roll Star,” lays out the blueprint for all that would follow in their world-conquering years: simple, catchy verses? Check. A shout-along chorus? Check. A swaggering encapsulation of the previous thirty years of British Rock? Check.

But what truly makes “Rock n’ Roll Star” stand out is the undercurrent of desperation beneath all the dick-swinging ambition. The opening lyrics, “I live my life in the city, where there’s no easy way out, the day’s moving just too fast for me,” underscore the mundane realities of working-class life after a decade of Thatcherian attacks on England’s welfare state. It’s a reality that the lads of Oasis knew all too well, and the song’s driving force is the sheer will to escape that existence by any means necessary—a quality that makes it so deeply moving.

The theme of music as an escape from hopelessness was hardly new in 1994, but in the thirty years since, you’d be hard-pressed to hear the will to conquer that despair expressed with the same beautiful, brazen cocksureness. It’s quite a statement of purpose for the album and the band, whose dreams of stardom would soon become real.

Category II: The Barnburner

The Barnburner is a dramatic, high-energy showstopper. Often released as the album’s lead single, the barnburner kicks off a great album with a blistering, attention-grabbing blast. The best barnburners are soaring and anthemic, though they may not always reflect the structure, lyrical themes, or instrumentation of the tracks that follow.

5 “Only Shallow” – My Bloody Valentine (from Loveless, 1991)

All the overindulgent rock critic platitudes in the world can’t diminish the sheer exhilaration of listening to My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 masterpiece, Loveless. It’s an otherworldly marvel, existing far outside the conventions of 20th-century Western popular music, infiltrating deeper levels of consciousness beyond mere sound. The opener, “Only Shallow,” launches the album with a quick snare count before Kevin Shields’ squalling riff—achieved by routing his guitar into two amps facing each other, their tremolos shaking at different rates—propels the song into a hypnotic hyperspace. Bilinda Butcher’s narcotized vocals drift weightlessly through the sea of instruments and effects in the verses, only for Shields’ ferocious riff to return and pulverize everything in its path.

Describing a song like this feels inherently insufficient, as words can’t fully capture its beautiful, ineffable nature. So instead, here’s the best advice I can give: go listen to it, right now. It’s probably the best thing I could ever tell you.

4 “Cherub Rock” – The Smashing Pumpkins (from Siamese Dream, 1993)

On “Cherub Rock”, The Smashing Pumpkins burst into their stellar sophomore album, Siamese Dream, with a dramatic spectacle of dizzying hard rock. Despite the well-known fact that almost every instrument (aside from the drums) was recorded by Billy Corgan alone, the track’s thick, immersive wall of sound could convince you otherwise. 

Opening with a drum riff allegedly lifted from a Rush song, “Cherub Rock” swiftly crescendos into an epic symphony of discontent, as Corgan whines about his outsider status among the likes of “cooler” bands. His lyrics resonate less in their specifics and more in the universal angst he channels—a superpower of his that connected The Pumpkins to millions of ’90s teens, despite his generally off-putting personality and the band’s “uncool” leanings (prog rock flourishes, melodramatic guitar solos),

Speaking of melodramatic guitar solos, the one that Corgan unleashes in “Cherub Rock” is a blistering, beautiful mess of piercing high notes emerging out from a blanket of gooey fuzz and heavily processed effects. It’s a swashbuckling twenty-second treatise that cements the song’s barnburner status. While Siamese Dream contains songs that explore a range of tempos and tones, “Cherub Rock” serves as the ideal gateway to them all.

3 “One More Time” – Daft Punk (from Discovery, 2001)

Although initially met with a somewhat lukewarm response from a handful of critics when it was released at the turn of the millennium, “One More Time” is now rightly celebrated as an all-time classic and one of music’s greatest party anthems. It’s a song that continues to draw people of all ages and walks of life to the dancefloor, serving as the ideal induction to Daft Punk’s universe of French house, disco, glam rock, and electro-pop, all baptized in futurism and nostalgia, that the duo craft on Discovery.

“One More Time” is centered around a simple, captivating, heavily-processed vocal hook sung by the late Romanthony that loops over and over as the bass thump and electro-funk drums build. The song enchants you into a state of pure boogielicious ecstasy before a beautiful, minimalist, nearly two-minute middle 8 gives you time to catch your breath. Almost a quarter century after its release, it remains inescapable, yet its ubiquity has done nothing to dampen the pleasure it induces. Just witness the pure joy radiating from people when the sound of the heavily-processed sample of Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You” that opens the song emerges from any speaker in the world, and you’ll understand.

2 “Crazy in Love (featuring Jay-Z)” – Beyoncé (from Dangerously in Love, 2003)

The song that not only propelled her post-Destiny’s Child solo career, but also catapulted her into the stratosphere as an artist and pop culture icon, “Crazy in Love” is a volatile canister of romantic obsession, propulsive rhythms, lavish funk-soul horns, and superstar swagger. It’s a rare song that sounds so combustible, yet so fully in control. It’s a song so danceable, so energetic, and so infectious that it’s impossible to sit still, even when just thinking about it. The sheer physical exhilaration of falling in love has rarely, if ever, been captured like this in a piece of recorded music. Not even one of Jay-Z’s more tossed-off, pedestrian verse can come close to blunting its momentum. While Beyoncé would go on to create albums that are more complex and evolved, “Crazy in Love” remains an explosive opener, setting a high-energy tone that defined not just Dangerously in Love but her entire trajectory as a global icon.

1 “Let’s Go Crazy” – Prince and the Revolution (from Purple Rain, 1984)

“Let’s Go Crazy”, the high-octane opener for both Purple Rain the soundtrack and the movie, fittingly begins with a playful irony. Prince’s iconic invocation of a funeral service—complete with a solemn church organ and the solemn address, “Dearly beloved”—quickly shifts gears into a frenzied celebration of life. As Prince’s sublimely ludacris opening sermon gives way to an ecstatic rave-up rock stomp, propelled by a simple call and response between organ and guitar, the song’s message is revealed: it’s not about death, but about living with wild, unabashed joy in the face of it.

While Prince often played every instrument on his earlier recordings (including his entire debut album, For You), “Let’s Go Crazy” is a group effort, with the entire Revolution firing on all cylinders. The band operates as a tightly oiled machine, teetering on the edge of complete chaos, but always remaining tightly in sync. By the time the group cuts out during the final minute to let Prince rip into an absurdly flamboyant solo guitar performance, the song has elevated you to a state of ecstasy and unhinged wonder. It’s the kind of irresistible, electrifying track that makes you want to buy into anything the man singing it is selling—be it an all-time classic album, or a delightfully erratic movie.

Category III: The Reinvention

The Reinvention signifies a significant departure in an artist’s sound or lyrical themes. Exceptional reinvention openers vary sonically, but consistently challenge listener expectations, boldly announcing the artist’s intent to subvert prevailing narratives about them.

5 “Farewell Transmission” – Songs: Ohia (from The Magnolia Electric Co., 2003)

In July 2002, Ohio singer-songwriter Jason Molina, who had cultivated a small but devoted following with his homespun folk-rock tunes under the name Songs: Ohia, gathered an assortment of instrumentalists at Steve Albini’s studio in Chicago to cut a new record. The result was The Magnolia Electric Co., released the following year, a transcendent and beautiful collection of songs that departed from Molina’s intimate sound, embracing widescreen, cosmic Americana. “Farewell Transmission” is the ideal introduction to this musical reinvention.

Reportedly recorded in a single take after Molina went over the song’s simple chord structure with the makeshift band, “Farewell Transmission” ushers listeners into the expansive world of The Magnolia Electric Co., where tossed-off space-cowboy musings and heartfelt human desires coexist harmoniously. The song commences with a cryptic slide guitar melody, gradually building into a cathedral of drums, guitar, piano, and ghostly backing vocals. Along the way, Molina conjures vivid, post-apocalyptic imagery and sings with fragile desperation about the will to persevere through darkness—yet ultimately concedes, “the real truth about it is, there ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross.” 

“Farewell Transmission” establishes the tone for both the album and the remainder of Molina’s career—a career tragically cut short by his death in 2013. Though he’s gone, the haunting beauty of “Farewell Transmission” continues to resonate through the cosmos.

4 “Ambitionz az a Ridah” – 2Pac (from All Eyez on Me, 1996)

The tale of 2Pac’s tumultuous final year has been so exhaustively chronicled and mythologized over the past quarter century that it’s easy to forget that his pre-Death Row musical output was far more lyrically eclectic than the unapologetic thug bravado showcased on the final studio album released during his lifetime, All Eyez on Me. The bloated (but brilliant) double album kicks off with “Ambitionz az a Ridah”, a track that marks the moment where ‘Pac shifted his primary focus as an artist away from social commentary and fully embraced into the glamorization of the gangsta lifestyle. 

Recorded just hours after Suge Knight bailed him out of prison and signed him to Death Row Records, 2Pac sounds magnetic, menacing, and vengeful as he spits bars about guns, shady women, and his growing paranoia. Eerily foreshadowing his own demise, he raps, ‘So many battlefield scars while driven in plush cars’ in the opening verse and later refers to himself as ‘reincarnated.’ Producer Daz Dillinger cleverly reworks the drum break from Joeski Love’s “Pee Wee’s Dance” and constructs a sinister, cinematic G-funk beat to match ‘Pac’s embrace of a gangsta nihilism. The beat stands in sharp contrast to much of the Bomb Squad-influenced production on his earlier albums, and though the rest of the beats on All Eyez on Me vary slightly, there’s a polished, hi-fi texture that unifies them all. The genesis of 2Pac’s transformation into a hardened, more maximalist version of the rapper he was before he went to prison begins with this masterful album opener.

3 “Monday Morning” – Fleetwood Mac (from Fleetwood Mac, 1975)

Fleetwood Mac’s evolution from a British blues rock band in the late ’60s to the California-based, cocaine-fueled pop rockers of the mid-’70s culminated with Fleetwood Mac (1975)—not to be confused with their 1968 debut of the same name. The first track, “Monday Morning” is an absolute gem of an opener, signaling the final death knell of the band’s blues roots and a full embrace of soft rock craftsmanship. Lindsay Buckingham makes his presence known right away on “Monday Morning”; his searing tenor enters a split second before Mick Fleetwood’s drums and all of a sudden we’re off on a whimsical rush of restless romanticism and buoyant pop . The chorus is a melodious, pleading ode to an unpredictable lover, and later on in the song, Buckingham’s beautifully-phrased slide guitar lead balances out the pop sheen with just the right amount of grit. While “Monday Morning” may not be Fleetwood Mac’s best song, it’s the track that introduced the world to the band’s transformation—an energetic, powerhouse start to a timeless album.

2 “Enter Sandman” – Metallica (from Metallica, 1991)

By 1988, with …And Justice for All, Metallica had pushed their innovative brand of thrash metal fundamentalism to its logical endpoint. Sure, they could have pursued even faster, longer songs with more unconventional structures, but the most radical move, according to the band’s drummer and resident provocateur, Lars Ulrich, was to simplify. After spending several years in the studio under the tough-love tutelage of Motley Crüe producer Bob Rock, Metallica reemerged with “Enter Sandman,” the opening track and lead single from the 1991 album Metallica (aka The Black Album). 

The song marked a radical simplification of the band’s sound, and though it alienated some hardcore fans, “Enter Sandman” propelled Metallica into the mainstream. Built around a striking, mid-tempo riff and an anthemic chorus, it still retains its potency after three decades of radio overexposure. “Enter Sandman” is a stadium metal lullaby—a big, dumb rock song of the best kind—and a powerful opening salvo for the album that launched a new, globe-conquering phase of Metallica’s career.

1 “Everything in Its Right Place” – Radiohead (from Kid A, 2000)

Radiohead’s sonic transformation on Kid A is the stuff of legend, lionized by the critics, indie heads, and music snobs of the world for a generation. The near-mythical reverence for Kid A might seem excessive if the album weren’t such a masterful reinvention of the band’s sound, and if “Everything in Its Right Place” weren’t one of the greatest opening tracks in music history. The song is a tense, sparse and seductive amalgamation of electronica and minimalism, with Thom Yorke’s glitchy vocals and disorienting lyrics evoking a kind of fragmented, crumbling mental state. Its harmonic structure defies the traditions of Western music by never resolving to a dominant chord. It all creates the sensation of being caught in an ominous loop of anxiety and dread.

Despite this, “Everything in Its Right Place” doesn’t feel oppressively dreary. Instead, the song conjures a sense of awe, a world of eerie beauty and mystery where Radiohead discover a new symphonic palette to express themselves. It sets the stage for the paranoia, surrealism, and musical adventurousness that define the remaining tracks on Kid A, and charts a new course that the band has (mostly) followed ever since.

Category IV: The Oddball

The Oddball opener breaks all the traditional rules of a great album start. Often slow, dissonant, or unusually long, these tracks steer the listener into the album’s mood in unexpected ways. Despite ignoring conventions, they work because they set the tone effectively—or simply because they’re undeniably great songs.

5 “Station to Station” – David Bowie (from Station to Station, 1976)

Instead of opting for the infectiously catchy “Golden Years,” David Bowie boldly chose to open Station to Station with its sprawling, ten-minute title track, which encapsulates the album’s inventive beauty and chaotic, coke-fueled energy.

After over a minute of flanged guitar mimicking the sound of train accelerating, the band jumps in, playing atonal, dissonant chords, and “Station to Station” immediately challenges the listener with the most decidedly antagonistic music of the artist’s career up until that point. The song settles into a slow-moving, trance-like groove which mirrors the dread and paranoia of Bowie’s lyrics, introducing his Thin White Duke persona–a vampiric, amoral Aryan superman– referencing Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley, and struggles with his global fame.

Halfway through, the song shifts into a triumphant, rocking, disco-soul groove, transforming the cold nihilism of the preceding minutes into a rebellious celebration in the face of meaninglessness. It’s an epic overture of decadence, an enigmatic embrace of spirituality, absurdity, and excess, as musically adventurous as anything a star of his orbit had created at the time. Despite its long running time and sonically demanding character, or perhaps because of them, “Station to Station” stands as one of the most monumental album openers of all time.

4 “Downward Spiral” – Danny Brown (from Atrocity Exhibition, 2016)

Danny Brown ascended to mid-level hip-hop stardom in the 2010s by pushing the genre’s boundaries, employing high-pitched, somewhat bizarre flows and a striking combination of darkness and humor to great effect. With his fourth studio album, the Detroit rapper delves even further into the shadows, summoning levels of emotional complexity and technical dexterity that few rappers could even dream of, let alone execute.

Atrocity Exhibition, a title inspired by the Joy Division song of the same name, begins with “Downward Spiral”, a dark, visceral window into the mind of an artist too caught up in depression and drug-induced paranoia to enjoy his own success. Lines like, “Your worst nightmare for me is a normal dream” are terse confessions of the demons he’s had to endure, but even in the despair, he can’t help but boast, “Nauseous, don’t know the last time I ate, but I eat these fucking rappers like a last steak”.

What makes this song so peculiar of an opener is the sparse, stripped-down beat. There’s very little percussion off which to syncopate, making the fact that Brown raps over them so skillfully even more of a marvel. The eccentric glitches and warped sample from a song recorded by obscure German krautrock band, Guru Guru, mesh with the dizzying beat to create a frightening, alluring, experimental atmosphere. While it’s a demanding introduction, purposely alienating to casual fans, it sets the tone remarkably well for the ambitious, incredibly unique work of songs that follow.

3 “Tears of Rage” – The Band (from Music from Big Pink, 1968)

The decision for a group to introduce their debut album with a five-and-a-half-minute ballad is, for lack of a more dignified word, ballsy. Yet, The Band’s “Tears of Rage,” which kicks off the phenomenal, timeless Music from Big Pink, serves as a superb lead-in to an album that defiantly resists the cosmic psychedelia of the time in favor of something deeply rooted in an earthly realm. This doesn’t mean it’s a mere retread of archaic sounds; the album is an impressionistic amalgam of almost every strand of American roots music—folk, country, blues, early rock ‘n’ roll, gospel—crafted by a group of Canadian men (and Arkansas-born drummer Levon Helm).

The innovation and craftsmanship displayed on the album are evident in “Tears of Rage,” a Bob Dylan-penned song ostensibly about a frayed relationship between a father and daughter, sung from the father’s perspective. However, delving deeper, connections to the Bible, the birth of America, and the political unrest of the 1960s become apparent. This thematic richness transfers to the music itself, populated by instruments both old (piano, horns) and new (clavinet, organ, electric guitar) that blend together beautifully.

Richard Manuel, pianist, and one of the Band’s three primary vocalists (along with Helm & Rick Danko), delivers a lead vocal performance so wounded and moving that it could melt even the coldest heart. While “Tears of Rage” may not be the best song on Music from Big Pink, it serves as a brilliant prelude to the rest of the album—a stunning dirge full of pathos that sounds as elemental as it does inventive.

2 “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” – Wilco (from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 2002)

If the goal of an album’s opening song is to be immediately accessible, irresistibly catchy, and to entice listeners to stay for more, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” appears to defy such expectations. It begins with a minute of disjointed avant-garde soundscaping—piano, synth, percussion, and various found sounds—before an acoustic guitar enters and frontman Jeff Tweedy starts singing. As Tweedy begins, it becomes clear that the song is exactly what it seems not to be: an accessible, melodic, and memorable pop song. Yet it’s one that has been deconstructed to its bare elements and reassembled with a MacGyver-like unorthodoxy and innovation.

The cryptic, poetic lyrics seem to describe the conflict between a relationship with another person and the relationship with self-destructive tendencies. Their contoured ambiguity renders any intended meaning secondary to their beauty and intensity. Around the five-minute mark, the song begins to break down into harsh, ugly dissonance—bursts of static, atonal piano, and jumbled vocals. By this point, the song’s shattered beauty has seeped into your soul and into the cosmos of broken communication that binds Yankee Hotel Foxtrot together.

There is much to read and watch about the album’s tortured creation, its rollout, and the myriad eerie connections to imagery surrounding the September 11 attacks, but the timeless quality of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot lies in songs like this opener. While defying conventional expectations for album openers, it successfully seduces the listener with its singular sound, setting the stage for one of the best records of the 21st century.

1 “Maggot Brain” – Funkadelic (from Maggot Brain, 1971)

The greatest oddball opening track of all time defiantly shuns conventional wisdom that dictates an album’s first song should be punchy, accessible, and tight. Instead, “Maggot Brain” presents a slow, brooding, ten-minute instrumental composed of only three central elements – a simple, descending chord pattern, light percussion, and perhaps the greatest guitar solo ever put to wax.

Though classified as an instrumental, the track opens with a spoken word introduction that sets the emotional context, with Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton referring to the “maggots in the mind of the universe.” The legend of how Clinton roused guitarist Eddie Hazel’s performance has been well-documented, though details remain disputed. Did Clinton tell Hazel to play as if his mother had died, or tell him that his mother actually had died before hitting record? Was Hazel tripping on LSD or just grief-stricken? The details matter less than the overwhelming feeling of mourning that emerges – mourning of a loved one, mourning of the lost ideals of late ’60s counterculture, mourning of a nation itself. The wah-drenched solo takes Hazel’s Hendrix-influenced sound to dark new emotive heights. His playing is dynamic, switching from wild, free-form anarchy to concentrated tightness with extraordinary dexterity. The raw emotion and deep evocation of pain Hazel expresses through his guitar creates an impassioned apocalypse of noise, simultaneously embodying the “maggots in the mind of the universe” and Clinton’s determination to “rise above it all, or drown in my own shit,” the words which close the introduction.

The spacey brew of funk, psychedelia, heavy rock, and soul in the six songs that follow expands upon these themes while at times embracing the twisted fun and humor in societal and personal decay. It’s an eclectic mix, and with the exception of the closing track “Wars of Armageddon,” any would have been a more conventional, safer choice to open the album. But beginning with “Maggot Brain” perfectly introduces the sonic and philosophical universe that Clinton orchestrates – an expansive cosmos of soulful grooves, lysergic guitar rock, racial consciousness, societal turmoil, and planetary destruction unlike anything else on this earth.

You can stream all these tracks on this playlist: