By "important" I mean that it didn't just become hugely popular, but it also changed a music genre or launched an entirely new one, or otherwise made a huge impact on music in general.

Primus, I don't know anyone else that sounds like them. Sailing the Seas of Cheese.

My suggestions:

• Boston (self titled) pretty much transformed how music was produced, using the studio as an instrument.
• Jimi Hendrix - "Are you Experienced". Because a guitar had never been played like that before.
• Nirvana - "Nevermind". Arguably not the first grunge album, but it pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of 80's music.

Honorable mention: Pantera - "Cowboys from Hell" finally moved metal beyond fluffy hair and leather pants that had saturated the genre for too long, and effectively ended the glam era.

I'd say for the same reason I posted Hendrix earlier: Primus deserves to be on the list because nobody had played a bass like that before.

While nobody else has (to my knowledge) gone full Claypool, using the bass partly as a rythm instrument has left its mark on many other basists.

While I can guess why, I'm not experienced enough with rap, hip, hop, or any combination of the three to be an authority on this, so could explain what makes the album hugely important?

• Velvet Underground and Nico
• Bringing It All Back Home (Bob Dylan)
• Kind of Blue (Miles Davis)

Rubber Soul - The Beatles
To me this marks a turning point in the Beatles' output, from fun, rock 'n' roll/pop music, to serious artistry, more challenging themes and lyrics and more interesting instrumentation.

Sample track: In My Life

Dubnobasswithmyheadman - Underworld
Hugely important in British dance music, a total departure from their first two albums and the start of a run of classic electronic music. It's a shame they're still best known for Born Slippy, because there's so much more to Underworld than that, and it started here.

Sample track: Dirty Epic

The Velvet Underground and Nico - The Velvet Underground
Famously known as an album that not many people bought, but all of those who did started a band. Hugely influential, full of great songs, some gentle and fragile, others cacophonic and dissonant. A masterpiece.

Sample track: Venus in Furs

Great suggestions, although personally I would have picked Electric Ladyland for Jimi, as that feels more as a well-rounded concept album showcasing his musical skills better. If only he hadn't died so soon, Band of Gypsys gave him the freedom to really do what he wanted.

King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King

This basically started progressive rock. I also remember being in absolute awe when learning it is from 1969, it sounds soooo clean and somewhat modern (and very good, obviously).

Agreed! As a doom metal and stoner rock fan, I'm hard-pressed not to name a band from those genres not influenced by the album or the band.

not sure I understand what you mean, the bass has always been a rhythm instrument, its traditional role is to mark tempo and provide the root for harmony. do you maybe mean using it as a percussive instrument, like Claypool often does with muted slapping?

My guess was that it started the east coast rap scene with the kind of sound I later would recognized from some other artists.

Yeah, percussive is a better word. And not in a typical funk-style slap bass either.

being a tull fan Im going to say stand up, aqualung, songs from the wood, and thick as a brick. The bands early career sorta brought progressive rock front and center and there is definately a difference between rock before the band and after thick as a brick and I think it was very much their influence. Songs from the wood sorta did the same for folk rock.

• Ramones - Ramones (1976)
• The Stooges - The Stooges (1969)

Seconding Rubber Soul. In the same way Pantera managed to separate metal from the glam, Beatles separated pop/rock from the campiness of earlier and contemporary bands.

Nothing - Meshuggah

It wasn't their first album by any means, but I think it was the most influential on metal music, it kind of spawned its own sub-genre (djent-core?). On this album they really honed in on the sound they made steps toward with Chaosphere, and it influenced the sound of metal moving forward into the late 00s and 2010s.

I haven't really been into metal as much as I was back when this came out, but it was really interesting to see this swedish metal band I randomly heard about in an AOL chatroom take off and become hugely popular and influential.

Is unique the same as important?

I'd argue that you got the band and the reason right, but with the wrong album. Chaosphere. Not as djenty as their later albums, but the seeds and saplings are clearly there.

Plus every metal drummer I knew back then tried to learn New Millennium Cyanide Christ.

Yeah I was debating between saying Chaosphere or Nothing, I can definitely see your argument as well. Really cool band with incredible musicians all around.

Rush - Fly by Night

Their second album is the first where they found their prog rock selves.

From wikipedia: The members of Rush have noted that people "either love Rush or hate Rush",[170] resulting in strong detractors and an intensely loyal fan base. In 1979, The Rolling Stone Record Guide called them "the power boogie band for the 16 magazine graduating class".[171] A July 2008 Rolling Stone article said, "Rush fans are the Trekkies/trekkers of rock".[172] Rush have been cited as an influence by artists including Alice in Chains,[173] Anthrax,[174] the Cro-Mags,[175] Dream Theater,[176][177][178] Exciter,[179] Fates Warning,[180] Fishbone,[181] Foo Fighters,[182] Iron Maiden,[183] Jane's Addiction,[184] Living Colour,[185] Manic Street Preachers,[186] Megadeth,[187][188][189] Meshuggah,[190][191] Metallica,[178][192] No Doubt,[193] Pearl Jam,[194] the Pixies,[195] Primus,[196] Queensrÿche,[197] Rage Against the Machine,[198] the Red Hot Chili Peppers,[199] Sepultura,[200] the Smashing Pumpkins,[196] Elliott Smith,[201] Soundgarden,[202] Stone Temple Pilots,[203] System of a Down,[204] Testament,[205][206] Tool,[207][208] and Steven Wilson.[209] Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said in the 2010 documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage that Rush is one of his favourite bands, and he has also cited the band's early 1980s period in particular as a major influence on him in regard to incorporating keyboards and synthesizers into hard rock.[210]

I'd add New York Dolls to that list too.

I wanted to mention rush, but I couldn't narrow it down to one album.

On a related note, I got tickets to see Rush next year, as I figured it'll be my last chance.
I decided to treat myself:

That's as close to the stage as I could justify with my paycheck. Closer is ridiculously priced, even by ticketmonster standards.

100%.

I would also put 36 Chambers by Wu-Tang Clan and Operation Doomsday by MF DOOM in the same tier of essential 90s NY hip-hop.

Michael Jackson - Off The Wall

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message

Sepultura - Roots

IMHO, perfect albums that you can listen to from the beginning to the end without skipping anything:

• Guns n' Roses, Use Your Illusion 1 & 2
• Radiohead, OK Computer
• Portishead, Portishead
• Bjork, Homogenic

Any specific era? I mean, I'm mostly into classical music and I would consider quite a few of those old pieces... hugely important, to say the least: much more meaningful than many of the more recent productions. But, even though I've a much more limited understanding of it, I also consider some more recent and even a few contemporary artists... hugely important ;)

Any era where music is released as part of albums, I guess.

Colors by BTBAM is probably the single most impressive prog metal album of this century. It really felt like the world stopped for that album, took it's time to digest it in full, then started over with a renewed sense of creativity.

Periphery 1. Commercialized the sound of Skith and Meshuggah and popularized Djent as a genre.

Exoplanet by The Contortionist dropped the same summer as Periphery 1 and it marked a clear line of Deathcore to Djent. Djent took over in full swing for about 3 years. Traditional Deathcore chased the trend or fell behind.

"Bela Lugosi's Dead" is considered the harbinger of gothic rock music and has been immensely influential on contemporary goth culture.[23] In an article by The Guardian titled "Bauhaus invent goth", the newspaper ranked the song number 19 on their list of the 50 key events in indie music history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi's_Dead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Flat_Field

!gothindustrial@lemmy.world

A lot of bands from the 90s to the early 2000s were inspired by Neutral Milk Hotels "In the aeroplane over the sea".

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash by the Pogues. Seemless blending of punk and traditional irish music that's still as raw and refined today as ever.

Pretty much anything by the Velvet Underground. They're the quintessential "barely anyone came to their shows but everyone who did started a band" band.

Early Pixies - Surfer Rosa or Come on Pilgrim. Basically no grunge otherwise.

Probably everything by Sun Ra, but his earliest wrangling of electronic keys into jazz in like the 40s or whatever seems pretty consequential. Plus probably no P-funk as we know it without Sun Ra, which has heaps of knock on effects.

They didn't invent slap base, but they did perfect it. You've convinced me they belong here.

It's honestly kinda cool the ouroboros-like influence between Les Claypool and Geddy Lee. Les has always credited Rush as a huge influence, but then Geddy's playing has also gotten progressively slappy-er over the years just from hanging out with Primus

Completely changed rock music

James Brown Live At The Apollo

https://youtu.be/R61iGCD9hgQ?list=RDR61iGCD9hgQ

Homework by daft punk had a kinda huge impact on french house

I'm no fan, but I imagine that there is an Elvis album on this list. Possibly Jerry Lee Lewis, too.

• Angel dust by faith no more. It has been cited as a massive influence by many huge 90s metal bands.
• Pet sounds by beach boys. Without it there would be no sgt Pepper (as we know it) and without that it's hard to say where pop would be today.
• The rise and fall of Ziggy stardust and the spiders from Mars by Bowie. While not being the source of the glam wave (hi t-rex) it really took it to a new level, along with the concept of stage personas.

Forgot to mention:

All of sly and the family stones albums. Larry invented slap bass, they renewed funk, Greg laid the groundwork for what all hip hop artists draw from, sly used a drill machine that was more or less a toy to create really nasty and murky beats by lioping, overlaying and tooting with speeds ented and theyinnovated sludgy lo-fi sound. All in a few years.

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon

With The Dark Side of the Moon, Rock enters its adult age, becoming culture music and reprogramming the figure of rock musician, now intellectualized and affected by a special strabismus for other forms of art. Listening to this album is like living a world: in this sense it remains open to the canons of psychedelic rock, but it redefines its boundaries, closing in fact that musical season and its main extensions of space-rock and progressive.

This one of funny because when reading about it I hit the feeling that they had no idea or plan to what they were doing. They just wanted to sell albums and get laid.

Then they drop this completely weird af, beautiful and haunting album which everyone of course tries to deconstruct and find the real meaning behind etc.

Just fripp and pals goofing about in the halls of the crimson king.

Loveless by My Bloody Valentine influenced a whole genre.

On the other end of the scale you have Forever Changes by Love which has been an inspiration for lots of musicians without ever directly influencing a specific sound as far as I know.

Wendy Carlos' ‘Switched-On Bach’ turned synthesizers from a tool of avantgarde experimentalists into a mainstream instrument.

Captain Beefheart's ‘Trout Mask Replica’ remains probably the most widely cited avantgarde-rock album, perplexing listeners to this day. (Gotta say, I never had a problem with it, perhaps because I don't know music theory.)

Kraftwerk's ‘Autobahn’ is an obvious one, though ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and ‘The Man-Machine’ probably had more influence on synthpop and techno.

Lou Reed's ‘Metal Machine Music’ was trashed on release by critics, and returned en masse by the buyers, but it presaged industrial and noise music, and possibly noise-rock.

Then again, though industrial music properly started with live performances, if you wanted to revisit its roots, you'd listen to Throbbing Gristle's ‘The Second Annual Report’ or the more warmly received ‘D.o.A: The Third and Final Report’.

The ‘No New York’ compilation was exemplary of the ‘no wave’ experimental jazz-rock of the downtown NYC scene and gave the genre its name.

Liaisons Dangereuses' self-titled album was the progenitor of ebm, e.g. with the track ‘Los niños del parque’.

This Mortal Coil's ‘It'll End in Tears’ “set the template” for dream pop, although the sound itself was already around in the work of Cocteau Twins and the ethereal wave movement.

The Winstons' 1969 track ‘Amen, Brother’ didn't start anything itself, but the ‘Amen break’ is one of the most sampled in history, beginning with the 80s breakbeat, and with jungle, drum-and-bass and breakcore having been predominantly built on this one sample.

Napalm Death's ‘Scum’ is the origin of grindcore.

John Zorn's ‘Naked City’ is a landmark in jazz-fusion: although the concept existed before, no one mixed jazz with other genres so aggressively outside of free-jazz. (Though arguably the band Massacre anticipated Zorn's approach.)

The Prodigy's ‘Experience’ is said to have birthed edm albums as a concept:

Moby credited ‘Experience’ with changing his perception about dance albums; previously he felt that "dance albums had always failed [...] because they didn't work over the full length of the record. Mostly they were singles collections which was exactly what I didn't want to do," and noted that ‘Experience’ "impressed me because they'd managed to create a full listening experience which encompassed various styles. This was the kind of vision I had for my debut album."

The ‘Artificial Intelligence’ compilation on Warp started idm.

‘Wipeout’'s electronic soundtrack, along with its acid visuals and nightclub-oriented promotion (by Designers Republic) was a big factor in targeting the first PlayStation to college-age people, instead of kids as it was with previous consoles. This shifted the console market from kids' toys to entertainment for everyone.

Therion properly invented symphonic metal around ‘Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas’ / ‘Lepaca Kliffoth’ / ‘Theli’.

The ‘Hotline Miami’ soundtrack played a large role in the popularity of synthwave and the 2010s revival of associated genres like darkwave, coldwave, ebm, and to some extent post-punk.

If you're into edm, you might want to check out Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music for various branching points.

I wrote down Pet Sounds as a majorly influential album and Brian Wilson has said that that cohesion and individual song strength of Rubber Soul was the inspiration that drove him to make it.

So i guess your pick inspired my pick!

Fear Factory - Demanufacture.

I couldn't decide whether it was this album or Soul of a new machine that pioneered clean singing in metal but I chose Demanufacture since it has such a timeless sound.

DJ Shadow - Endtroducing

This singlehandedly brought to the forefront sample-based trip hop for all to hear. Soulful, haunting, melodic, and with an ever evolving back beat, filled with social consciousness. Herbie Hancock's Rock It introduced the world to the idea of turntables as instruments and Endtroducing was an album length love letter to that instrument.