The 50 Greatest New York Albums

From Uncut Take 219 [August 2015 issue], our Top 50 of the greatest New York Albums.

Perhaps inevitably, it is a wide-ranging list that covers many genres and years in the city’s musical life. Our chronological survey begins at a concert called An Experiment In Modern Music; in many respects, that is a phrase you could apply to all the albums here, from early explorations in form and structure at the city’s jazz clubs through punk’s rowdy shenanigans at CBGB or Max’s Kansas City and onwards – our list includes doo wop, folk, disco, soul, hip-hop and indie, and reaches deep into the new millennium. Our journey takes us from Birdland to Studio 54 via East Village coffeehouses, from addresses in Queens’ Kew Gardens Hills and Ditmas Park in Brooklyn to a brownstone on the Upper West Side, the Chelsea Hotel and a chapel on a university campus. Here, then, is Uncut’s pick of the finest albums born of the city’s five boroughs…

1 GEORGE GERSHWIN
RHAPSODY IN BLUE [1924]On February 12, 1924, New York’s Aeolian Hall hosted a concert called An Experiment In Modern Music. Clustered into sections with titles like ‘Contrast: Legitimate Scoring vs. Jazzing’, the programme included a new 18-minute piece by Brooklyn-born Gershwin: “A Rhapsody In Blue”. Written between Broadway commissions, Gershwin’s piece became an early blockbuster – the initial recording was one of the first records to sell over a million copies. Critically, the success of “Rhapsody…” helped legitimise jazz – the dominant musical idiom in New York for the next 30 years.

2 FRANK SINATRA
THE VOICE OF FRANK SINATRA [1946]Though most of his classics were recorded in LA, Ol’ Blue Eyes’ first proper album – a set of four 78s – was mostly tracked in the city that Sinatra thought of as home. The eight compact songs here, from “You Go To My Head” to “Paradise”, still conjure up images of midcentury New York in the mind of the listener, from the sparkling grandeur of Midtown’s hotel bars to the murky, violent underworld of the Italian-American Mob that then still held the city in its grip. Sinatra’s voice already sounds sublimely world-weary here, despite the fact he hadn’t yet reached 31.

3 ART BLAKEY
A NIGHT AT BIRDLAND VOL 1 [1954]Originally located at 1678 Broadway, Birdland wore its achievements modestly: the club’s marquee carried the legend, “Jazz Corner Of The World”. Accordingly, the venue attracted the movement’s biggest names from its opening night on December 15, 1949: Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Stan Getz among them. A number of remarkable live performances were recorded at Birdland, especially Art Blakey’s landmark set from February 21, 1954; crisply produced by Blue Note founder Alfred Lion, it captures the intricate interplay between hard bop pioneers, trumpeter Clifford Brown and pianist Horace Silver.

4 LEONARD BERNSTEIN
WEST SIDE STORY ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING [1957]Relocating Romeo And Juliet to New York’s blue collar Upper West Side during the 1950s was an inspired move by lyricist Stephen Sondheim and composer Leonard Bernstein. Mixing everything from Tin Pan Alley to jazz, Latin and classical, Bernstein’s impressively eclectic score echoed the urban stew of the city itself. “America”, meanwhile, playfully juxtaposes the ideal of living in the States with the actual experience of new immigrants: “Skyscrapers bloom in America/Cadillacs zoom in America/Industry boom in America/ Twelve in a room in America.”

5 DION & THE BELMONTS
PRESENTING DION & THE BELMONTS [1959]A meeting between Dion DiMucci and fellow Bronxborn Italian- Americans The Belmonts, their heyday ran from 1957-60, when they were the city’s pre-eminent doo wop heartthrobs. The first of four albums they recorded together, Presenting… showcased their infectious, fingerpopping talents, including singles “I Wonder Why”, “Where Or When” and “A Teenager In Love”. Their impact on New York citizens was not inconsiderable. “I have always listened to Dion’s voice,” said one notable New York resident, Lou Reed. “It’s inside my body and head forever.”

6 MILES DAVIS
KIND OF BLUE [1959]Originally from Illinois, Davis moved to New York in 1944. He had already achieved a great deal by the time he recorded Kind Of Blue at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio. An instinctively brilliant recruiter, the band on this LP was assembled from the best musicians playing the city’s jazz clubs, including John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers. Brainstormed with pianist Evans in Davis’ Upper West Side brownstone, the hip rhythms and pulses of Kind Of Blue presaged the next era in jazz.

7 ODETTA
AT CARNEGIE HALL [1960]“The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta,” Bob Dylan told Playboy in 1966. Dylan missed Odetta’s engagement at Carnegie Hall – he didn’t move to New York until the following year – but this April 8, 1960 concert by the Alabama-born Ms Holmes captured her varied repertoire – “Gallows Pole”, “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child”, “If I Had A Hammer” – and strong, soulful persona. She’d first performed in the city in 1953 at the Blue Angel club, and after At Carnegie Hall she returned to the city three years later to record Odetta At Town Hall.

8 JAMES BROWN
LIVE AT THE APOLLO [1963]One of the most fêted live LPs of all time, and a key document of Brown and The Famous Flames’ drilled, inexhaustible R&B power, Live At The Apollo also captured a New York institution at it zenith, a Harlem theatre whose discerning, passionate audiences empowered black artists like Brown as much as the performers empowered them. Check how the band left space for the screams, and how Brown fed off them in “Lost Someone”, a classically imploring soul slow-burn extended into an outrageous 10-minute provocation. “Gee whiz, I love you!”

9 BOB DYLAN
THE FREEWHEELIN’ BOB DYLAN [1963]Dylan’s self-titled debut captured the sound of New York folk clubs at the start of the ’60s, but it was the follow-up that best illustrated what could evolve from those storied coffee shops. Freewheelin’… showcased a talent that was at once archetypal and transcendent: an angry young man grappling with the city, with politics and love, and trying to find a unique way to articulate it all. Unlike most others, he succeeded. And how better to sell an album about your lover leaving New York than by putting a picture of the two of you, near your West 4th Street apartment, on the front cover? 

10 WOODY ALLEN
WOODY ALLEN [1964]Equally capable of free-roaming and improv work, jazz musicians and stand-up comedians often shared NY stages during the 1950s and ’60s. Allen mastered both. A former TV sketchwriter, he made his stand-up debut at the Blue Angel in October 1960. Sample joke: “My parents were too poor to buy me a dog, so they got me an ant.” This, the first of Allen’s three standup LPs, was recorded outside the city but it showcased an act honed in NYC clubs, rich in the wistful futility that became a critical component of his film work. 

11THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO [1967]Despite being primarily recorded in Los Angeles, the VU’s debut perfectly evokes the seediness of Manhattan in the mid ’60s. The spirit of the city’s counterculture is everywhere – Warhol produced the album, managed the band and provided the cover, while Factory superstar Nico delivered suitably dead-eyed vocals on three cuts; most famously, “I’m Waiting For The Man” depicts a trip “up to Lexington – 1-2-5” to a Harlem brownstone to score heroin. What’s more, the screes of atonal noise conjured by Reed and John Cale set the blueprint for New York’s later waves of noise-rock.

12 JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE
ELECTRIC LADYLAND [1968]Jimi Hendrix’s relationship with New York began in the mid ’60s as a member of Curtis Knight And The Squires; then as a Greenwich Village regular with Jimmy James And The Flames. He returned to the city to record the bulk of his final album with the Experience at the newly opened Record Plant studios. Credited on the sleeve as “produced and directed by” Hendrix, Electric Ladyland took shape while he was living at New York’s Drake Hotel. Combining live jams with psychedelic epics, the album satisfactorily reflected Hendrix’s wide-ranging ambitions; the album also gave its name to the Electric Lady Studio he built in a former Greenwich Village fixture, The Generation Club on West 8th Street.

13 LAURA NYRO
NEW YORK TENDABERRY [1969]Born in the Bronx, Nyro quickly established herself as one of the city’s most potent songwriters before becoming a performer herself. Her third solo album, New York Tendaberry, was a more intimate document than what had gone before, being mostly a collection of stark and soulful piano ballads that expressed Nyro’s typically complicated relationship with her unforgiving hometown: “There’ll be no mercy on Broadway,” she noted. Ultimately, though, love triumphed: “Sidewalk and pigeon,” she sang on the magisterial title track, “You look like a city/But you feel like religion to me…”

14 SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER [1970]NYC resonated in the music of these former classmates from Queens’ Kew Gardens Hills neighbourhood. They finessed their act in Greenwich Village coffee houses; later, Simon explicitly referenced his home city in “Bleecker Street”, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” and “The Only Living Boy In New York”. Their final studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, contains “The Boxer”; a typically New York yarn of a smalltown boy defeated by the big city, the vocals for the chorus were recorded in St Paul’s Chapel at New York’s Columbia University.

15 LEONARD COHEN
SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE [1971]Like many a good poet, Leonard Cohen rarely rushed his songs. This third album might have been recorded in Nashville and London, but plenty of the material it drew on dated from earlier phases of Cohen’s life, from a time – specifically in the case of “Joan Of Arc” – when he had holed up in the Chelsea Hotel. “Famous Blue Raincoat”, meanwhile, compounded Cohen’s reputation as chronicler of the intelligentsia and their romantic intrigues. The Lower East Side might be cold, but there’s still “music on Clinton Street all through the evening…”

16 STEELY DAN
CAN’T BUY A THRILL [1972]Back in the ’60s, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had attempted to make it as pop songwriters, touting their wares around Broadway’s Brill Building. Some of these songs made up their debut, full of the snark and wit of New York – “Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)” profiles Fagen’s seedy neighbours, while “Midnite Cruiser” evokes the later Taxi Driver movie with its portrayal of a disaffected cabbie. Elsewhere, the vivid rhythms of the city’s Latin population are present in “Do It Again” and the majestic “Only A Fool Would Say That”.

17 FANIA ALL STARS
LIVE AT THE CHEETAH VOL 1 [1972]The Fania record label was born in the early 1960s, a partnership between Johnny Pacheco (a Dominican-born bandleader) and Jerry Masucci (an Italian- American lawyer) that began with them selling records out of a car boot in Spanish Harlem. The music they handled was an ecstatic, virtuosic fusion of musics from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Dominica that became known as samba, epitomised by Pacheco’s own work leading the expansive Fania All Stars. On this live set, critical solos from big hitters like Willie Colón and Ray Barretto never detract from the indestructible groove. A classic example of New York City’s melting pot culture in rapturous full effect.

18 BOBBY WOMACK
ACROSS 110TH STREET [1972]During the ’70s, inner city New York was the go-to setting for Blaxploitation films including Shaft, Super Fly and Black Caesar. Named after the boundary between Harlem and Central Park, director Barry Shear’s film Across 110th Street followed two detectives from the NYPD’s 27th Precinct as they pursued the perpetrators of a bank heist through Harlem. The soundtrack was split between Womack’s tough rock-soul grooves and JJ Johnson’s more conventional orchestral score, and Womack’s title track proved to be his most enduring single, a grim snapshot of less salubrious urban living: “Harlem is the capital of every ghetto town.”

19 NEW YORK DOLLS
NEW YORK DOLLS [1973]Recorded in eight days at the Record Plant and produced by New York resident Todd Rundgren, the Dolls’ debut album summed up the wide-eyed wonder of suburban boys (the various Dolls hailed from Queens, Staten Island and The Bronx) let loose in the metropolis to pursue wild lifestyles. The album was essentially a diary of life on Manhattan’s margins, with its protagonists equally damaged and glamorous. Though some dismissed the Dolls as Stones copyists, their amped-up, strutting rock’n’roll would inspire a generation of outsiders.

20 PATTI SMITH
HORSES [1975]Few artists capture the quintessential New York blend of high-flying aesthetics and street-level epiphanies better than Patti Smith. Punk, in retrospect, seems a bizarrely reductive classification for her debut album. Recorded at Electric Lady, its visionary, fervid mix of poetry and music, of family and icons, introduced a performer (and, of course, her great band) that epitomised the city’s lawless intellectual glamour. Worth considering, too, as an album that magically, lyrically transformed a city in a way comparable to how Van Morrison had presented Belfast on Astral Weeks.

21 RAMONES
RAMONES [1976]Along with New York Dolls’ debut, the Ramones’ first album provided the catalyst for much of the city’s ensuing punk revolution. Stripped down, raw and honed at scuzzy Lower East Side venues like CBGB, it captured the brutal, nasty side of Manhattan in a way no-one had since the VU. Raucous highlight “53rd And 3rd” details murder among Midtown’s rent boys, while the cartoonish “Beat On The Brat” was reportedly inspired by Joey Ramone seeing a Queens mother going after her son with a baseball bat.

22 TELEVISION
MARQUEE MOON [1977]While Tom Verlaine’s troupe sprang from the same art-punk scene as Ramones, they mixed their angular riffs and raw delivery with another strain of New York music: avant-garde jazz, audible in the band’s lengthy jamming and Verlaine’s biting, modal soloing. The impressionistic lyrics, too, portrayed the rougher areas of lower Manhattan as some kind of psychedelic playground, with the singer and guitarist channeling his favourite French poets in tribute to the island. “Broadway looks so medieval,” he mutters on standout “Venus”.

23 RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS
BLANK GENERATION [1977]Six months after Television unveiled Marquee Moon, their former bassist Richard Hell released his own Blank Generation, recorded with a new band including the wild, avantgarde- inspired Robert Quine on lead guitar. While Tom Verlaine worked with refined elegance, Hell headed straight for the gutter, preaching nihilism in ripped clothes and spiked hair, duly inspiring the punk scene on both sides of the Atlantic. “Love Comes In Spurts” is two minutes of visceral, streetwise frenzy that could only have come from Manhattan’s mean streets.

24 TALKING HEADS
TALKING HEADS: 77 [1977]Though Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth had attended Rhode Island School Of Design, they formed Talking Heads in New York, developing their arty, brittle funk in venues such as CBGB and the Mudd Club, sharing bills with the Ramones. Aesthetically very different to the noisier end of NY punk, with songs like “Psycho Killer”, Byrne and co practically invented the nervy, jerky and intellectual brand of art rock that for a time, with the rise of The Rapture and Liars in the noughties, would come to define New York. 

25 THE BEE GEES
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER – ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK [1977]A sound (and film) synonymous with New York, Saturday Night Fever documented events on the streets and dancefloors of Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighbourhood. It was along such streets that John Travolta’s Tony Manero would strut to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” on his way to the 2001 Odyssey nightclub or an assignation at the Verrazano- Narrows Bridge. The Bee Gees soundtrack – interspersed with other great disco staples – did much to not only revitalise the Gibbs’ ailing career but also helped shape the cultural identity of both the decade and New York itself.

26 VARIOUS ARTISTS
NO NEW YORK [1978]While the likes of Television and Talking Heads ascended into the mainstream from Lower Manhattan’s art scene, a host of others were too uncompromising to move much beyond the underground – or in most cases even record albums. Groups like DNA, the Contortions and Mars, all profiled on this seminal comp curated by Eno, deconstructed rock music, leaving only blocks of dry, brutal sound, punctuated by atonal vocals, syncopated rhythms and otherworldly noise. The perfect reflection of the dystopian, decaying New York of the late ’70s.

27 CHIC
C’EST CHIC [1978]With NY gripped by hard times in the late ’70s, the endeavours of the Chic Organisation did much to provide a positive counterpoint. Assembled by native New Yorker Nile Rodgers from the Sesame Street, Apollo Theater and Radio City house bands, Chic had shored up their formidable songwriting skills by their second album. Written after an altercation outside the city’s Studio 54 club, the album’s first single “Le Freak” sold seven million copies, encouraging listeners to “Just come on down to the ’54/ Find a spot out on the floor.” New York club culture had never sounded so swish.

28 BLONDIE
PARALLEL LINES [1978]Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and co firmly left behind the Downtown scene of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City for charttopping new wave on their sugarcoated, sophisticated third. As usual, they were firmly in touch with the zeitgeist, dabbling with disco on “Heart Of Glass”, and paying tribute to the club scene of Studio 54 in its video. There were lighter moments, such as the girlgroup pop of “Sunday Girl”, but Blondie left room for a nod to NY art-rock with the menacing “Fade Away And Radiate”, featuring reptilian guitar from Robert Fripp.

29 JOHN LENNON
DOUBLE FANTASY [1980]Lennon moved to New York in August 1971; the city subsequently inspired his solo work, evidently on 1972’s Some Time In New York City, but also on Double Fantasy. Lennon spent five years as a stay-at-home father raising son Sean in their Dakota apartment and accordingly many of the songs on Double Fantasy reflect Lennon family life: “Woman” and “Beautiful Boy” among them. Recorded at the Hit Factory on West 48th Street, it was Lennon’s final studio album, released on November 17. He was shot outside the Dakota three weeks later on December 8. 

30 VARIOUS ARTISTS
ANTI-NY [2001]Closely related to the no wave scene, groups such as Gray, highlighted here alongside other noisy, arty types from the early ’80s, spilled from the fertile art and performance art scenes of Lower Manhattan. Gray are now known best for the individual work by notable members – painter Jean- Michel Basquiat and filmmaker Vincent Gallo; their industrial “Drum Mode”, included here, is unsurprisingly uncompromising. Elsewhere, Sexual Harassment’s “If I Gave You A Party” is a lo-fi slice of pioneering electronic funk, while Ike Yard’s “NCR” is minimal electronica years before the Warp label, proof that New York has always been ahead of the times.

31 GRANDMASTER FLASH & THE FURIOUS FIVE
THE MESSAGE [1982]Kool Herc might have got there first, but it was Joseph ‘Grandmaster Flash’ Saddler who emerged from the Bronx to take the New York art of DJing into the mainstream. The title track, both sweeping and precise in its vision, obviously dominated proceedings on the debut album from Flash and his rapping cohorts. But search out latterday reissues, which supplement the tracklisting with the still-startling 1981 single “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel”, a scratching and mixing masterclass on three turntables.

32 MADONNA
MADONNA [1983]Suburban misfits seeking to recreate themselves in the big city vestiges of the city’s pre-AIDS Downtown culture: a raw quirkiness and bouncy R&B grooves evident in “Borderline”, “Holiday” and “Lucky Star” that her later albums airbrushed over for a more polished sensibility.

33 RUN-DMC
RUN-DMC [1984]“In case you wonder what all this means/We’re funky fresh from Hollis, Queens…” What Run-DMC’s crunchy, raw debut album meant was actually a whole lot more; it was the first rap album to go gold in the States, and one which introduced a streamlined version of hip-hop that was brutal in its directness, with refrains that were catchy as hell – “It’s Like That”, most notably – while circumnavigating anything that much resembled conventional musicality. It launched a New York dynasty, too: production was handled by Run’s brother Russell Simmons, soon to co-pilot the Def Jam label into musical history.

34 BEASTIE BOYS
LICENSED TO ILL [1986]Formed as a hardcore punk group – they even played Max’s on its final night – Mike Diamond, Adam Yauch and Adam Horovitz got interested in New York’s rap scene in the early ’80s and soon enlisted a young Rick Rubin as a DJ. After a handful of hip-hopinspired releases, the trio toured with another Manhattan upstart, Madonna, in 1985 before releasing Licensed To Ill, a pile-driving, pioneering mix of rock, sampled beats and sometimes unsavoury rhymes. Throughout, the city is central – “You’re from Secaucus, I’m from Manhattan,” they boast on “The New Style”.

35 PUBLIC ENEMY
IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK [1988]The polemical intensity of Public Enemy remains striking nearly three decades down the line, their insurrectionist ardour providing a commentary on local and world affairs from the perspective of African-Americans in Long Island. “Shame on a brother when he dealing/The same block where my 98 be wheeling,” intoned the stentorian Chuck D, “And everybody know another kilo/From a corner from a brother to keep another – below.” The second album’s sound design was just as revolutionary, however: The Bomb Squad’s meticulously orchestrated melee of sirens and samples captured the sensory bombardment of city streets – chaotic, sometimes dangerous, relentlessly exciting.

36 LOU REED
NEW YORK [1989]An avid chronicler of city life, in New York Reed scrutinised his hometown with an ambitious new perspective. Released as Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office were drawing to a close, Reed raged against the misfortunes that had befallen his city: chafing against racial violence in “Romeo Had Juliette”, social injustice in “Dirty Blvd” (featuring a spot from an early Reed hero: Dion) and AIDS (“Halloween Parade”). He bid adieu, too, to his former patron Andy Warhol on “Dime Story Mystery” – though he paid lengthier tribute, along with John Cale, on Songs For Drella the following year.

37 WU-TANG CLAN
ENTER THE WU-TANG (36 CHAMBERS) [1993]Led by The RZA, an enigmatic connoisseur of the most slurred and muggy beats, the nine-strong Wu-Tang Clan emerged from the hinterlands of Staten Island as a fierce, hermetically tight force. Like many of their contemporaries, the Wu-Tang Clan’s stock in trade was street narratives, but these were street narratives infused with a mythology pieced together from superhero comics, kung-fu yarns and gangster movies. The RZA’s empire-building production project soon birthed a sequence of great solo albums (notably from GZA, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Methodman and Ol’ Dirty Bastard). None, though, matched the antic camaraderie and arcane menace of this collective debut.

38 JEFF BUCKLEY
LIVE AT SIN-É [1993]If his father Tim’s musical free spirit remains forever associated with Southern California, Jeff Buckley’s New York profile was established by this debut release: a four-track solo EP recorded in an East Village coffee house, satisfyingly expanded into a 34-track, 2CD set in 2003. It captured the range and virtuosity of a singer-guitarist working through his influences (Nina Simone, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Billie Holiday) and making something new out of them – something which in turn inspired wild, romantic compositions like “Mojo Pin” and “Eternal Life”, both premiered here.

39 NAS
ILLMATIC [1994]At a time when LA hip-hop appeared in the ascendant, a new generation of New York rappers began vigorously asserting themselves in the mid ’90s: Jay-Z, The Notorious BIG (a victim of the East Coast-West Coast spats by 1997) and, perhaps best of all, Nas. His debut album introduced an eloquent voice from the Queensbridge Projects, articulating the dreams and realities of ghetto youth with an authenticity that became an article of faith to his contemporaries and followers. “Nothing’s equivalent,” he noted ruefully, “to the New York state of mind.”

40 DAVID MANCUSO PRESENTS THE LOFT [1999]On Valentine’s Day 1970, David Mancuso hosted a party at his Broadway apartment that heralded the beginning of a New York institution – The Loft – and a private club scene that would have a radical impact on the world of music. The records Mancuso played through a magisterial soundsystem were as eclectic as his guests (including future DJ legends Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan and Nicky Siano). Nuphonic’s 1999 2CD compilation neatly captured the celebratory scene, not least thanks to the inclusion of “Is It All Over My Face”, a mutant disco masterpiece created by another crucial New York mover, Arthur Russell.

41 THE STROKES
IS THIS IT ]2001]Just before Manhattan fully gave itself over to gentrification, five young men fresh out of Swiss finishing school gave it one last musical hurrah. The Strokes, led by Julian Casablancas, took all that was coolest about the NYC of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s – Lou Reed’s twisted storytelling, Tom Verlaine’s needle-sharp guitar, Thurston Moore’s insouciance and the Ramones’ ‘last gang’ image – and distilled it into effervescent songs like “Last Nite”, “Hard To Explain” and “New York City Cops”, all rich with Casablancas’ wry, snotty lyrics. The bawdy cover even looked like a Warholesque creation.

42 SONIC YOUTH
MURRAY STREET [2002]Almost every album Sonic Youth released is a tribute to the city they formed in, and fed off, and their 12th album is perhaps the most potent. Recording sessions in their own studio in the financial district’s Murray Street were disrupted by 9/11, with bassist and guitarist Jim O’Rourke in the studio when the planes hit a few blocks away. Completed the following year, the album was by then repositioned as a paean to the city Sonic Youth loved, Murray Street’s sign adorning the back cover and some unexpectedly elegiac, beautiful tones infusing the stately songs.

43 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
THE RISING [2002]Much of The Rising was written in response to 9/11: songs like “You’re Missing”, “Into The Fire” and “My City Of Ruins” conspicuously addressed themes of loss, faith, fear and, most importantly, hope. Indeed, Springsteen’s first album with the E Street Band in 18 years foregrounded individual emotions and spiritual concerns – “May the living let us in/Before the dead tear us apart,” he sang on “Worlds Apart”, gracefully and eloquently navigating a path through the trauma left by the World Trade Center attacks.

44 INTERPOL
TURN ON THE BRIGHT LIGHTS [2002]Like The Strokes, Interpol have their roots in Ludlow Street’s Luna Lounge, a breeding ground for the groups of New York’s early noughties indie boom. The fourpiece took their inspiration from the monochrome post-punk of Joy Division and The Cure, yet still encapsulated the angular, dour sound so prevalent in the Big Apple at the turn of the century. “The subway she is a porno/The pavements they are a mess,” sings Paul Banks on “NYC”, as reverbed, droning guitars mass in the background.

45 ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS
I AM A BIRD NOW [2005]The journey of Chichester’s Antony Hegarty is one of those transformational New York parables, as a smalltown ousider finds creative and personal fulfilment in the city’s bohemian milieu. A photograph of Candy Darling adorns the cover of this, Antony’s second and best album, wherein most listeners first encountered her uncanny voice. Numerous auspicious guests dropped by, too, most notably Lou Reed, anointing Antony as a successor of sorts: an artist whose internal emotional narratives are critically contextualised by her environment; a poignant spirit liberated by her adopted hometown.

46 THE NATIONAL
ALLIGATOR [2005]Much like their adopted home in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park enclave, The National’s trajectory has been one of steady upcycling while retaining a liberal, offbeat spirit. Alligator – their third album – saw the band make a leap to a bigger label, Beggars Banquet, but still privilege their best-known quality: a nocturnal, melancholic mood. “The Geese Of Beverly Road” was named after a Ditmas Park street, while elsewhere Matt Berninger’s lyrics conjured up the romantic pull of New York life: “I’ve got $500 in twenties and I’ve got a ton of great ideas,” he sang on “City Middle”.

47 TV ON THE RADIO
RETURN TO COOKIE MOUNTAIN [2006]By the time TV On The Radio released their 2004 debut Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, the centre of alternative culture in New York had shifted to other boroughs, notably Brooklyn. The album picked up plaudits from the likes of longtime NYC resident David Bowie, who then provided backing vocals for “Province” on the quintet’s mightier follow-up, Return To Cookie Mountain, two years later. Mixing psychedelic textures, anthemic funk and ecstatic vocal interplay, “Wolf Like Me” and “Let The Devil In” showed that the cultural kaleidoscope of New York continues to spawn innovative, euphoric music.

48 LCD SOUNDSYSTEM
SOUND OF SILVER [2007]James Murphy and his DFA label fomented a major dancepunk revival in early-noughties New York, and this second LCD Soundsystem album crystallised a certain local mindset: at once snarky, hedonistic – even in early middle age – and unflinchingly self-aware. Straddling the worlds of rock and disco, Sound Of Silver found Murphy on tour, yearning for his hometown as the only place in the States where the Christians are kept off the streets (“North American Scum”). “New York I Love You,” he sang on the Bowieish closer, “but you’re bringing me down”; the conflicted urbanite made great crooning flesh.

49 VAMPIRE WEEKEND
VAMPIRE WEEKEND [2008]Graduates of the prestigious Columbia University in northern Manhattan, from the start Vampire Weekend knowingly played with the imagery of the East Coast’s privileged, preppy subculture, both in their appearances and in their lyrical preoccupations (“Oh, your collegiate grief/Has left you dowdy in sweatshirts/ Absolute horror…”). The more upmarket areas of New York City are always present, too; amid harpsichord and strings on “M79”, singer and guitarist Ezra Koenig describes a bus ride across Central Park, even remarking on a “pollination yellow cab” that he spots.

50 SHARON VAN ETTEN
TRAMP [2012]Jersey-born Sharon Van Etten’s third album offered a lucid snapshot of Brooklyn’s music scene in the 2010s. Produced in Aaron Dessner’s Ditmas Park studio, it featured cameos from many of the borough’s storied residents, including Bryce Dessner, Beirut’s Zach Condon and Julianna Barwick. But evidently Van Etten’s album was more than the sum of its collaborators. A nuanced exploration of a toxic relationship, Van Etten’s songcraft was charged with bracing one-liners – “I had a thought you would take me seriously,” and “You’re the reason why I’ll move to the city/Or why I’ll need to leave.”

Reviews written by Michael Bonner, John Mulvey and Tom Pinnock