Guns N Roses - Appetite For Destruction

The greatest hard rock debut album ever recorded. Released on July 21, 1987 on Geffen Records, Appetite For Destruction arrived from five hungry, dissolute kids living out of a rehearsal space on the Sunset Strip and changed the course of rock music permanently. It is the best-selling debut album in US history, with over 30 million copies sold worldwide and 18 million in the United States alone, certified 18-times platinum by the RIAA.

None of it happened overnight. The album sold modestly on release before MTV picked up "Welcome to the Jungle" in late 1987 and everything changed. By the summer of 1988, "Sweet Child O' Mine" had hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and Guns N' Roses were the biggest band on the planet. Axl Rose, Slash, Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradlin, and Steven Adler had captured something that could not be manufactured or replicated, the sound of five genuinely dangerous people playing rock and roll as if their lives depended on it, raw and filthy and irresistibly alive in a way that the slick, polished rock of the era could not touch.

From the opening riff of "Welcome to the Jungle" to the closing thunder of "Rocket Queen," Appetite For Destruction does not waste a single second. "Paradise City," "Mr. Brownstone," "Nightrain," "My Michelle," and "Out Ta Get Me" are all here, each one as ferocious and fully formed as anything in the hard rock canon. Producer Mike Clink captured the band exactly as they were, and the result is a record that sounds like it could have only been made once, by exactly these five people, at exactly this moment.

Essential by any measure.