20 Albums That Influenced Me

This is the first album I remember buying with my allowance, bought on cassette. I really loved Amy, the CCM scene did her wrong. CW: Some religious lyrics.

This is the band I credit for my getting into metal, even though I realized later that they're not metal at all. CW: Very religious lyrics.

This is the first album I remember claiming as my own, has the first song I remember getting really obsessed about, and is the first time I remember caring about stuff like limited/numbered releases. I can't take the lyrics anymore, but the music itself holds up. CW: Very religious lyrics.

I bought this album as a joke and then the band ended up being my favourite for a decade, got me into ska and, ultimately, how I met my partner. Also introduced me to the wonderful world of the young Internet - I lived on the FIF message board for years, made some great friends that I talked to into my undergrad years, even met one IRL. CW: Some religious lyrics.

This is the first album I latched onto when I was finally allowed out of the cave I grew up in, the first album that got me so jacked up that I wrote about it (for an English uni course), the first and only band I paid to join the fan club of. Also the first album in this list of 20 that I still love.

This album was the start of me listening to extreme metal to relax/focus, being my regular soundtrack for studying organic chemistry - I made sure it was always in my bag with my discman my whole undergrad. They were a Christian metal band that started as thrash/death metal, but this album is (really solid) groove metal/metalcore.

Also in regular rotation in my discman during my undergrad. First film score I got obsessed with.

If I had to pick one "album to know me", it would be this one. Saw them before this (their debut) came out and HATED them, but by the time I heard the album, I had changed my tune. They became my favorite band of all-time, never let me down. I miss them dearly. CW: Some religious lyrics, but band wasn't really a religious band.

This was the first Björk album to come out after I became a fan, and it remains both my favorite Björk album and one of my all-time favorites. Also was my introduction to Tagaq.

I can still remember seeing the newspaper article announcing Elliott Smith's death, exactly where it was in the entertainment section, the size, the photo used. He was working on this album when he died, and it was released a year afterwards. Even 20 years later, every listen is like visiting a memorial.

I was already into this band (i.e., Chris Crisci) before this album, but this one made them an all-time favorite. Was so happy to finally catch a live show right before the pandemic - was ridiculous that there were only like 30 people there, but it was glorious.

This album scared the shit out of me the first time I heard it, and then it somehow became the album I listened to to fall asleep when I used to travel on my own, and now it is the album I reach for whenever I have trouble sleeping at home.

I used to work in a lab processing donated blood, a job that attracted very interesting people. An older coworker invited me to go see the livestream of the Met Opera's (2011) performance of Satyagraha, screening at a local theatre. That was my intro to Glass, and I was instantly hooked. It wasn't until recently that the recording of that Met performance was released, so this is the one I listened to since.

In 2012, I discovered what the kids used to call "grunge". My partner had done his best to get me into it earlier, but it wasn't until I was grading 1st year Engineer students' English papers that I found the video of this performance, and I became proper obsessed with Pearl Jam, then Alice in Chains, and then that whole era of music. Became the first era I started kinda seriously collecting records from.

Though Henry Rollins had already thoroughly schooled me in Nick Cave à la The Birthday Party, it wasn't until 2016 when I was some 30,000+ feet in the air that I actually gave a Bad Seeds album a listen. I found this on Icelandair's entertainment system and listened to it on repeat the entire flight to Iceland. Such a mood, and forever now linked to Iceland for me. Also, I originally created a Discogs account in 2016 just so I could buy a copy of this on vinyl, the first of MANY Discogs purchases, lol. So while the album cost only $17.28, it's to blame for a lot more than that...

This album radically changed the definition of "deep dive" for me, and is perhaps the first/only record in my collection I would consider sacred (in a non-religious sense). It's also my least listened to favorite album because I never want it to become background music, and each listen is almost a rite. I essentially only put it on for Bowiemas/Bowienalia.

This album and band mean a lot to me. I also experience the album unlike any other - I feel shapes, every time I listen to it. And the last time I travelled was to see this tour, in 2019. Mike Scheidt said in an interview that they don’t want YOB shows to be entertainment, they want people to leave feeling better. That was 100% my experience. We met Mike after the show, and all I could say was ‘thank you, for everything’.

This is the first in what I will call a (un)holy trilogy of albums from 3 amazing women, all different styles but all metal-adjacent. All 3 got a "holy fuck" reaction the first time I heard them, and continue to captivate me. I feel like the 3 of them combined capture, uh, me, or at least the 3 main types of music I gravitate to: beautiful, sad, and angry. This album in particular is all 3 of those things.

This is the second in my list's (un)holy trilogy of albums from 3 amazing women. ERR's solo music isn't metal (it's mostly really sad), but ERR herself is VERY metal adjacent. My partner and I starting listening to her solely because she had picked a YOB album for her "What's In My Bag" Amoeba video (which we saw a year after this album came out) and she's been blasted in our house ever since.

This is the last in my list's (un)holy trilogy of albums from 3 amazing women. Kris Esfandiari came from a similar religious background as me, and uses her music to deal with it. While Lingua Ignota's religious imagery doesn't make me uncomfortable because she's actually singing about issues I don't connect to, with this album, I hear my past with every note. I'm quite thankful it has an ugly element to it, tbh.

Bonus #1: I'm not sure there's ever been an album before this one that I so obsessively listened to. Like, over 200 times between its release in October (2023) and the end of the year. (I started suspecting I might be on the spectrum around the same time...) This tour was also the first concert I went to since the pandemic started (and only concert, so far), making it a whole different experience for various reasons.

Bonus #2: This album represents my crowdsourced playlist experiment. I usually keep up with new stuff and work on an AOTY list all year. But this year (2024), I've essentially just been listening to recs from the Fediverse, catching up on what I've missed. Not only have I found tons of new-to-me faves, but I've realized I had a lot of dumb preconceptions. So, thanks to the Fediverse, I now know I love Seal! And NIN! And Gary Numan! And and and...