I don't recall having seen this pop up in this community. Give a rundown of your favorite albums. Top slot, top 3, top 5, 10... whatever's easiest to you since I know it can be tough to narrow things down to a specific degree.

It'll be interesting to see where everyone is coming from in this regard. Could create for a good opportunity to discuss albums, find people with similar tastes, argue that a different album from someone's catalog is better, etc.

I'll throw mine down in a separate comment once I get it figured out.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I grew up downloading songs a la carte and now I use services like Spotify and YouTube Music, so I never paid much attention to albums as a whole.

But there's a couple of standouts for me, albums I have listened all the way through multiple times, and they're both from Iron Maiden:

Rock in Rio live, 2001

Most of my life, I thought concerts were stupid because I'd only been to ones at like, the county fair, with shitty country music from amateur cover artists on blown out speakers and surrounded by drunk and rowdy rednecks.

This is the album that convinced me that live shows were worth seeing. In my opinion, this is the gold standard for live albums. I've never seen any other band with so many in their discography, and it makes me wish that other bands released more. But it makes sense: Iron Maiden has always been a show band first, and a studio band second.

The crowd has the perfect amount of presence in the mix. Someome took the time to make sure you can always hear them, adjusting the levels so that they never drown out the band and vice versa. And you can feel how large the audience is. And they're total putty in Bruce's experienced hands.

It inspires a real sense of community that I've come to crave from live shows, even as an introvert, and it helped kick off a life-long addiction.

Brave New World, 2000

I think we can all agree that almost every album has a weak track or two. One that's just boring or doesn't fit with the rest, that seems just kind of thrown in.

Not this album.

This album heralded the triumphant return of lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith after 7 and 10 years, respectively.

It's the first album with the full-bodied, punchy Iron Maiden sound that I've come to love. Instead of firing Janick Gers to make room for Smith, they just said "fuck it, let's have three guitarists," and it fucking works. And they still have the same lineup almost a quarter century later.

Not every song is iconic, but they're all enjoyable, and several of them would end up being staples of their setlists going forward. (They also played many of them at Rock in Rio as part of the supporting tour.)

It's not explicitly a concept album, but it very nearly works as one. And the album art is actually really fucking cool (Iron Maiden's album art is admittedly hit or miss cough Dance of Death cough).