Roundtable's 1001 albums to listen to before you BWOOMPH out!

Hey y'all! Recently I've been picking through the discography presented in the book "1001 Albums you must hear before you die" and while I think it *does* do a pretty good job of covering culturally significant musicians and records, it's also got plenty of picks that feel less historically relevant and more personally relevant to the author's taste, in some cases.

Which, kinda got me thinking! Obvs anybody could rattle off their own list of personal albums they believe to be must-listens, but what happens when you open that up to a community? To a specific group of critters who connect and share interests? What does a community sound like, in essence?

Well, I think we should try and find out! I propose a little exercise: let's compile a list of albums! Ones that we adore, ones that are our favorites, ones that have a significant personal impact or fond memories attached to them! We can build out our own 1001 albums, beheh.

To that end, some ground rules!

1) You may add 3 albums to this list! They can be ones important to you, ones you love, or just ones you feel it important that are represented and shown off to the community!

2) (Optionally) with each recommendation, give us a lil writeup on how you feel about the album! What it means to you, why you love it, what kind of rating or score you would give, that sorta thing!

I don't usually listen to full albums as much as individual tracks, but if I had to get the ball rolling, just two that I personally love are How to Be a Human Being by Glass Animals and Gemini Rights by Steve Lacy =w=

two that I personally love are How to Be a Human Being by Glass Animals and Gemini Rights by Steve Lacy =w=

Oooh, How to Be a Human Being is a REALLY good pick tbh, love that album... I don't think I've ever heard Gemini Rights so I'll have to give it a listen one of these days! Once we've got enough Albums selected I think I"m gonna put them in a list and shuffle them and do like, an album a day... I think that'd be a fun way to celebrate this lil exercise!

As for me! It's a REALLY tough thing to select just three albums, at any given moment there's like a 70% chance I'm listening to music! It's something deeply important to me! (hence why one of my fursonas is even a deity of music in the first place, mwroohoo!)

Buuuuut, I think the 3 that I'd want to go on a community-curate list would be

1) "Awaken, My Love!" by Childish Gambino



This album. Oooogh this album. Such a beautiful blend of soul, R&B and even funk, It feels as much a love letter to the Era of Funkadelic as it is a Love letter to, well, the concept of Love! It is so fraught with it. The passion, the tenderness, the vulnerability, the angst, you really feel the full range of emotions that love can take you through in this one. I don't think I'll ever forget the first time I listened to this album, especially that Opening Track. "Me and Your Mama" is fucking phenomenal!! Music has made me feel SO, so many things, but holy fuck I had never a song as full-bodied as I did this one. I actually had to stop what I was doing dead in my tracks to take a breath, I felt like I had just gotten into an actual fight, it was incredible. Just absolutely phenomenal!!

2) "Lonely Magic" by Rebecca Sugar


(This is just the music video for the opening track, the full playlist can be found here!)

This record is a bit of a newer release, it dropped August of 2025, but man oh man has it grown to be beloved by me,,, Done by Rebecca sugar, (yes, the very same one of Steven Universe fame!) this record is such a beautiful one. It's an exploration of what it means to create, what it means to love, and what it means to kind of experience the intertwined nature of both acts! Ice water is so joyous and full of passion that I can't help but feel myself break into a smile any time I hear it,, and "Love the Way it Feels" (which, as a fun aside, is a studio recording of a song she wrote specifically as a graduation address at a college she was invited to speak at) is genuinely a song that I think has changed the course of my life. I have a strong desire to create, to build worlds and experiences and pour my heart out into something. I love it, I truly do! But man do I doubt myself often,,, this song just, really struck a chord in me, it's given me the courage to do the things I'm passionate about for myself, for the mere love of creating, for the way it feels to me. It's actually in part what's given me the strength to try my hooves at moderating here in the round house! This entire album is wonderful and I think everyone should hear some of the messages within, even if only once.

3) "April Fools" by The Scary Jokes



This album was here for me through some really dark times, I'll spare the forum a traumadump but needless to say hearing songs that so thoroughly reflected my experiences at the time meant a lot, helped me feel less alone in a lot of the stuff I was enduring back then!

Lonely Magic is real cosy. Also one of my favourite albums of last year, just a shame it's so short!

[N.B. This post is kinda gonna be on behalf of the whole system, as music tastes between members aren't too wildly divergent.]

I've mentioned him already in a music thread, so I'd be remiss to not toss Daði Freyr into the pool. He's comfortably my favourite musician of the 2020s, known for making kinda poppy, kinda dancy music but with a constantly underlying wholesome theme to them. Virtually all of his songs are about how much he loves his kids, or loves his wife, or his anxiety about fame, or how he doesn't really want to do anything but make music and be with his family; all supplemented by him just being a really quirky and funny guy in general.

As for the actual album I'm submitting, I'm gonna go with I Made An Album, as his first 'proper' album (I guess?) My song pick from that isn't his most popular, his most high budget, or even my favourite (that's "Moves to Make"). It's "Thank You", the song he ends his live shows with, which I think sums him up quite well, I think.



Submission the second would be my favourite of the 2010s, Public Service Broadcasting. They're a British 'art pop' band, most of their albums are centred around a historical event, and they integrate archive audio about those events into their music, often (but not always) in place of traditional lyrics.

They've done albums and EPs about the fall of the Welsh coal mining industry, the founding of the BBC, the sinking of the Titanic, the London Blitz, and the one that first caught my attention, The Race for Space.

My sample song from it is "Go!", in which they document the Apollo 11 moon landing, but make the conscious choice to do it not from the perspective of the astronauts, but of mission control. This is, once again, not even my favourite track from the album, but it's what introduced me to a band that I still love a ton, so it's important to me in that way.



My third selection might be a bit of a weird one, but it's Reddishness by Girls Rituals (one of the many pseudonyms of Devi McCallion, aka Blacksquares, who might be best known as being one half of the noise pop duo Black Dresses). My warm take is that I really like noise pop. There's something so visceral about taking raw emotion and turning it into unfiltered noise that really appeals to me.

Reddishness is described as an album about things that get Devi's blood pumping. To me, it's an album dripping in metaphor about dysphoria and the transgender experience. For me, my experiences with the gender diversity of both myself and my friends is really epitomised by "Shield", which I've always interpreted as being about the trans protagonist struggling to support a trans friend whilst battling against their own dysphoria. The battle of being a protector whilst also needing protection.

"Shield" is my most listened track to piece of music for the entire last decade, so it kinda has to go in.

This is phenomenally hard beyond words, haha.

For the purposes of answering this, I quickly scrolled through and mentally ran through all the albums I remember particularly loving to a point of calling them a favourite at some point. Then I had to reeeeeally think between both listenability beginning-to-end, where the album was in my life in how it affected me, any contexts of how it would've before if applicable and how much I'd gladly re-listen when the mood strikes.

I basically winged it otherwise I'd not of been able to choose soon enough to answer, so here's the albums I've chosen for you Hoofus to beam up into this (currently) hypothetical master-list of great albums:


The Killers - "Sam's Town"

Out of all the albums from my teenage years, this is the one I'd be most happy to revisit whenever I'd like. Like everyone else, I'm a partial product of my environment and The Killers were *massive* in my neck of the woods (and yes, indeed its the same part where "Mr. Brightside" has never left the singles charts) and while 2006 was a great year for albums to me, this is one that endures. Exemplifies the best qualities of the band and their songwriting while evolving from their debut. It was a hard time, but albums like this made it worth living through,


Kate Bush - "Hounds of Love"

Several reasons for this one. First, even when I was a smaller kid, Kate Bush's work had a profound effect on me and I could've chosen many other albums over this one, but this is her functionally most solid work. Secondly, I had the supreme privilege of seeing her perform a residency at the Apollo (London) in 2014 and as part of that, the whole of Side 2 was performed and dramatised on stage as part of the concert that night so that association will forever be attached. Thirdly, this had a resurgence a few years ago so yippee, this is almost my most contemporary pick! Uh...almost. =P


Brian Eno & Harold Budd - "Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror"

I discovered ambient music through another album I almost chose for this in the Summer of 2010 and one of those people responsible for those elements in that album, Brian Eno, I then looked deeper into work-wise and this album has stayed with me since I discovered it. It got me through many difficult times, including but not limited to health scares and dealing with a loss in the family, and will likely get me through many more. Nothing sets me aside from the world and replenishes my mind and soul like this album does. (Sorry for the Spotify share of this, the playlist I was going to share of the album from YouTube had a track removed, hope this is okay as an alternative. Let me know if not!)

So there's my choices! This made me realise I both like way too many albums and yet also don't listen to albums enough as so much of what I'm into musically is more agnostic of which albums they originate from than I keep thinking they may be, but I wish ya the best on this project for sure~

This was a tough one, to just narrow it down to three--my music tastes are really broad. I think I managed to put together three personal bangers though!

Rabbit Junk - Apocalypse For Beginners



What with them being Eternally In My Top 3 Favorite Bands, I couldn't NOT contribute a Rabbit Junk album, and Apocalypse For Beginners is, I think, their best one; an all-killer no-filler string of total jams. It's been said that Bad Governments Make For Good Music and the barely-withheld righteous fury throughout this album definitely supports that sentiment. It's also a showcase of all of Rabbit Junk's own influences--this is definitely their most VARIED album sound-wise, from the opener "Heavy" sounding like a lost Rammstein track to a surprising surf-metal track in "Bodies" that almost sounds like a downtuned Offspring song. If you can't stand roared vocals then about half this album isn't gonna be for you (the blast-beat interruptions in "Nostromo" took a while to grow on even me), but even then it's got some mellower tracks to even it out, in particular the sweet-but-melancholy "Love Is Hell" and the uplifting community-spirit anthem "Rabbit Out Of Hiding." (Linked here as its my favorite from the album.)

Mark Knopfler - The Ragpicker's Dream



Like the inevitability of Rabbit Junk for me, I also knew that a Mark Knopfler album was an absolute lock for this. Formerly of Dire Straits but at this point having a much longer and more storied solo career, Scottish guitar virtuoso Mark Knopfler was a staple of my childhood listening via my dad and is one of the few artists I grew up with that not only still gets regular play from me, but has new albums hotly anticipated and for whom my interest has only grown! He's still kicking too, despite his age, still putting out new material. The real question was which album. The Ragpicker's Dream isn't necessarily my favorite album of his--I'd have to think about that for even longer--but it IS a good one for showcasing his range, specifically of topic. Knopfler is a storyteller above all, and though his songs tend towards the slice-of-life historic, he can make a song about just about anything. In this album alone he's got a song about Scottish bricklayers working in Germany ("Why Aye Man"), a carnival freak show group who form a found family ("Devil Baby"), a talented cobbler giving a sales pitch ("Quality Shoe"--which is the one I've linked here), the roadrunner cartoons ("Coyote"), and a group of homeless folks having an alleyway potluck ("Old Pigweed").

Louie Zong - Cartoon Funk



Louie Zong is a more recent discovery for me--I got into him sometime in the last four years or so--but oh, what a discovery. Very loosely fitting the categorization of "a jazz/funk musician" but highly experimental, Louie brings a playfulness to his music that's hard to find outside of outright comedy artists that just makes him a joy to listen to. You can hear him having fun in every note. This album's also an unusual one for him, as a lot of his albums are really wild concept albums (listing a few off from the top of my head: Italo Disco covers of Mario music ("Let's-A Go!"), boss encounter themes for a nonexistent RPG ("Boss Rush"), music meant to sound like it comes from a workplace training video ("Business!"), and Craig Bartlett-esque background tracks from a nonexistent cartoon about animal roommates ("Funky Friends")). Cartoon Funk, by contrast, is more of the musical equivalent of a full toybox, each track feeling like a micro-experiment in sound and theme. If you don't like even one track off of this album...then you probably just won't like Louie in general! I guess "range" is the theme of this trio of recommendations, because his range is pretty on-display here!