The best double albums ever made

When Donna Summer unloaded Bad Girls, she served up a disco-pop album for the ages. The LP was certified platinum four times, and tracks like "Hot Stuff" and "Bad Girls" are pantheon songs in the Hot Girl Summer continuum. Although disco wouldn't be super popular much long after this release, Summer's contributions helped make the outline for female pop superstars of the future. 

With its fusion of rock, blues, and folk, Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti is as stylishly eclectic as its title suggests. Tracks like "In My Time of Dying," "Houses of the Holy," and "Kashmir" represent some of the group's best.

As tranquil as it is soulful, Isaac Hayes' Black Moses is a quintessential example of classical R&B rendered to perfection. On the double album, Hayes emits gentle warmth and sensuality with a ghostly baritone as he reimagines Jackson 5 and Dionne Warwick songs in his own likeness. Released amid key moments in the Civil Rights movement, the project was credited for promoting Black pride, making it a deliverance befitting of its album title. 

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is an LP that managed to earn plenty of critical acclaim while also being certified five-times platinum. Noted for its cynical undertones, sonic diversity, and spurts of melodrama, it was even better received by critics upon its reappraisal years later, with its humanity and status as a snapshot of an era only working to its benefit. 

The story of The Wall focuses on the fracturing psyche of a fictional rocker named Pink, who's reckoning with the way the death of his father, mean teachers, and a cruel world led him to the point he's at in this story — a person building walls to protect themselves. Laced with metaphors, introspection, and expressive guitar flares, Pink Floyd's The Wall is a concept album for the ages, a rock opera that pushed the group's creativity to its limits. It also helped expand the world's imagination of what musicians could accomplish. 

Bruce Springsteen's The River was an inimitable blend of pop, rock, and folk that only crystallized his superstar status. Songs like the contemplative "The Ties That Bind" and "Independence Day" find Bruce at his most reflective, while "Hungry Heart" flaunted his knack for love songs. Years after its release, the LP has been certified quintuple platinum and stands as an example of a music legend at his apex. 

Tusk is what happens when artists value craftsmanship above all else. A deliberate departure from their commercial juggernaut album Rumours, this one is experimental, with each member bringing their own musical dimensionality to the fold, making for an artful collage of sounds and sentiments that strike at the heart of the time. But like the best projects, it's of its era, but also something all its own. 

While it's gotten plenty of acclaim in the years since its release, The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. was generally panned by critics upon its 1972 debut. In 2003, Mick Jagger even admitted he hated the way the project was mixed, saying that "Jimmy Miller wasn't functioning properly." 

And yet, for the album, The Rolling Stones found perfection in imperfection. The sloppier mixes gave the songs a raw feel that better encapsulated the spirit of rock and roll. They blended spurts of more impressionistic writing with occasional splashes of linear yet equally potent stanzas. With its scattered lyricism, "I Just Want to See His Face" captured mania and impulse, while tracks like "Torn and Frayed" focused on specific images that explored humanity with subtlety and sensitivity. 

Chaotic yet precise, Miles Davis' Bıtches Brew is what happens when you combine wild experimentation with experience. For this effort, Davis flutters through elements of jazz, surreal rock, funk, and R&B for jams that oscillate between high-speed thrills ("Spanish Key") and pensive ambiance ("Sanctuary"). It's jazz, but more accurately speaking, it's Miles Davis' wicked cauldron of sound. 

Recorded in New York and Tennessee, Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde is a project that saw him fuse genres in ways that were then unpredictable. For "Pledging My Time," he dove into down-home blues, while for "I Want You," he leaned back into folk rock, using his sincerity and earnest baritone to thread the varied sounds and emotions. By the time he dropped this one, Dylan was already a superstar. But a few years after its release, it was clear that folks were in the presence of a certified legend. 

Really, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below  is more like two solo albums from two group members than a true double LP. And yet, it still gets this classification on a nominal level, and it's no gimmick. By letting André 3000 and Big Boi embrace their truest tendencies — and their intermittent synergy — this album let OutKast truly be more than the sum of its parts. Big Boi flaunted his dexterous raps while sharing slots with everyone from prime Jay-Z to Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz. Meanwhile, 3 Stacks traded in rap for psychedelia, pop, jazz, and cosmic soul. As eclectic as it is structurally sound, as infectious as it is artistically bold, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is one of those ones. 

Sprawling and pristine, Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is about as wholesome a double album as you'll find. With ballads ("Candle in the Wind") with iconic pop tunes like "Bennie and the Jets" and the LP's titular track, you get a mix of everything, with Bernie Taupin's penmanship remaining as sharp as ever. 

In his first outing as a solo artist, Prince wasted no time serving up a dense slab of artistic genius. A cosmic blend of rock-inflected funk and symbolic songwriting, Sign o' the Times, along with Purple Rain, became known as Prince's best, a project that crystallized his legacy as maybe the most gifted pop artist of his time. 

After taking over the East Coast with Ready to Die in 1994, The Notorious B.I.G. returned with Life After Death , a 1997 double album that blended the most affecting street raps with spurts of ominous soul ("What's Beef") and glittering pop ("Mo Money Mo Problems"). For this one, the rap Martin Scorsese can be as poignant as he is funny all within a few bars, and he also reminds competitors that he could take their style and do it even better than them (see "Notorious Thugs"). With its fusion of nimble flows, virtuosic songwriting, and dynamic production, the legacy of Life After Death is eternal. 

It's likely that Jimi Hendrix had a lot more to offer before his tragic death in 1970, but 1968's Electric Ladyland feels like a pretty comprehensive distillation of his talent. Here, he swerves between psychedelia ("Burning of the Midnight Lamp") and rock-inflected blues ("Come On (Let the Good Times Roll)" ). He even served a radicalized cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" as he tested new sonics and vocal approaches. Refined but oozing creative impulse, the project was at once experimental and inevitable, a pristine glimpse of Hendrix at his best. 

Songs in the Key of Life is apex Stevie Wonder. Combining his teardrop tenor with songwriting that could be blissful ("Isn't She Lovely") or deeply philosophical ("Love's In Need of Love Today"), the project renders the complications of humanity with versatility and serene beauty. Checking in at one hour and forty-five minutes, it's a long listen that zig-zags between psychedelic funk and saccharine R&B, themes of love and racism, and much more. It's as sonically sprawling as it is cohesive, a testament to Stevie's penmanship and virtuosic musicality. Wondrous, indeed. 

At the 1998 Grammy Awards, Ol' Dirty Bastārd further immortalized the Wu-Tang Clan when he said, "Wu-Tang is for the children." The thing is, by that point, it was clear they were kind of for everyone — obscenity aside. That idea was crystallized with the release of Wu-Tang Forever, a project that featured the crew's most dynamic tracks yet. RZA's production was grander, the members' raps more adventurous, and as a whole, the LP was a reminder of why we wish some things really were forever. 

2Pac was a lot of things during his brief but iconic music career, but when people remember the slain rapper, it's usually the version that appears on All Eyez on Me. Laced with machismo, unrepentant rage, and bits of simmering sorrow, the double album was ’Pac in all his glorious extremes. He oscillates between tragic mortality ("Life Goes On") and thug invincibility ("Ambitionz Az a Ridah"), and regardless of how subject matter, you never doubt his sincerity or his ability to make you feel it. Twenty-seven years after its release, All Eyez on Me remains an inimitable mosaic of a man who could be good and bad — and everything in between. 

The Beatles' self-titled 1968 album was a timeless showcase for versatility. Throughout two discs, the crew slid between reggae, classic folk, blues, and the psychedelia of the era as they delivered metaphysical meditations on spirituality ("Dear Prudence"), love ("Julia"), and even the Civil Rights Movement ("Blackbird"), rendering them through gorgeous prose and deeply human sensitivity. Although the album was, in some ways, the beginning of the end — the intense arguments during its recording helped push the crew apart — it's also them at their most affecting.