The 5 Best Double Albums Of All Time

Double albums have sometimes held a dubious place in the world of popular music. Though, of course, they offer listeners twice as much bang for their buck in terms of material to listen to, double albums often receive criticism for being bloated, unfocused, and self-indulgent. However, when they actually come together, the results can be spectacular.

For this list, there won't be any aimless progressive rock noodling, or tired misguided jams created purely to fill wax after a band has run out of material. Instead, each of these double albums finds the artists who made them at a creative peak, confidently exploring ideas and creating magic, even if the circumstances surrounding the recording of the album were less than ideal.

From Stevie Wonder's defining work to the project that saw the Rolling Stones return to their roots to deliver arguably the greatest record of their entire career, each of these albums offers a feast for music fans decades after they were first made. And for modern music fans, there's even the added bonus of no longer having to change the disc halfway through.

"Songs in the Key of Life" is Stevie Wonder's masterpiece, the accumulation of everything he had explored musically since coming to prominence as a child star with his single "Fingertips (Part II)" in the early 1960s. Back then, he was known for his harmonica and bongo playing, but a decade and a half later he was a master multi-instrumentalist, with seemingly no end to his talents or the genres he was willing to explore with his music. 

Released in 1976, "Songs in the Key of Life" is a romp that gives a panoramic view of the era as the title suggests. While Wonder builds on his abilities as a writer of love songs as demonstrated on the album "Talking Book" with new classics such as "Love's in Need of Love Today" and "Joy Inside My Tears," which show the 27-year-old having reached a point of remarkable insight into human emotions, the double album's extended runtime also allows Wonder plenty of space to examine contemporary social issues. "Black Man" and "Village Ghetto Land" explore the lives of Black Americans in a tumultuous decade. Throughout, the album digs into gospel, R&B, funk, and soul, making the tunes as kaleidoscopic as life itself. Meanwhile, the irresistibly catchy "Sir Duke" offers an upbeat tribute to one of Wonder's musical inspirations, the jazz bandleader Duke Ellington. 

"Songs in the Key of Life" received universal acclaim and was a huge commercial smash. It gave Wonder his third Grammy for album of the year, and is estimated to have sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone.

Bob Dylan's rise from darling of the New York folk scene in the early 1960s to boundary-pushing studio artist by the middle of the decade had been rapid. While all of his early albums are considered classics, he expanded his range enormously with 1965's "Highway 61 Revisited," which saw him controversially embrace electric instrumentation and rock aesthetics that truly married him to the burgeoning youth-led counterculture. And with the expansive double-length "Blonde on Blonde," released the following year, he grew even more ambitious.

After months of sessions in Studio A in New York, where he had recorded the bulk of his discography to that point, Dylan found himself struggling to capture the sound he was after for his next album. He relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, connecting with veteran country music session players to develop an eclectic, rootsy sound that drew from country, blues, folk, and rock. Meanwhile, his songwriting grew more risk-taking, such as on the opener "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," with its refrain "everybody must get stoned," a provocative lyric for 1966. Elsewhere, Dylan offers some of the most beautiful ballads of his career, such as "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," a song dedicated to his new wife, Sara Lownds.

The album was the result of often long nocturnal sessions of solitary writing in the studio for Dylan, with the musicians only called on to perform in the morning when the songwriter was sure of his new material. It was an unusual process, and what resulted was an album full of surprises, which critics often cite as the strongest release in the Nobel Prize winner's sprawling discography.

By the mid-1970s, Led Zeppelin fans had long grown familiar with the British blues rockers' aptitude for the epic. But with "Physical Graffiti," the only double studio album of the band's career, the four-piece took things to another level, delivering a masterwork that, surprisingly, was in part pieced together using several offcuts from their former album, 1973's "Houses of the Holy."

The band had toured extensively on both sides of the Atlantic after forming from the ashes of the Yardbirds in 1968, and had delivered five studio albums that put them at hard rock's top table. The sessions for their sixth album came at a moment of exhaustion. However, they retreated to the sanctuary of Headley Grange, the manor house they used to write and record, to survey their existing material and write songs for a new album. The result was a sprawling offering that featured hard rock classics such as the menacing "Kashmir," eccentric funk-infused tracks such as "Houses of the Holy" — a leftover from the previous record that nevertheless fits beautifully on "Physical Graffiti" — and experiments such as the sweet country rock track "Down by the Seaside."

"Physical Graffiti" was highly anticipated. Fans pre-ordered more than two million copies of the double album, sending it double platinum prior to release. While it has been tradition for the 1973 album "Led Zeppelin IV" to take top billing among the band's studio output, more recently "Physical Graffiti" has emerged as one of the band's most acclaimed albums, which reveals Led Zeppelin at their wide-ranging and confident best.

It was somewhat unexpected for the Rolling Stones to release a double album, a format that has often lent itself to ambitiously epic arrangements or grand concepts. The Rolling Stones were not naturally a conceptual band; their album "Their Satanic Majesties Request," which the Stones themselves later wrote off as bad work, was an attempt to match the grandeur of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." 

But on 1972's "Exile on Main St.," Mick Jagger, Keith Richards et al. are on top form, delivering arguably their finest album and one of the best double albums of all time. Recorded at Richards' rented house in the south of France amid heavy partying and finished in Los Angeles, the album saw the Stones' lead guitarist adopt greater creative control, digging deep in his composition of both riffs and lyrics to deliver song after song of raw and vigorous rock 'n' roll. Instead of being grandiose, Richards brought the Rolling Stones back to their roots — with thrilling results.

The album is famous for its crowd-pleasing rock hits like the swaggering "Tumbling Dice" and the confrontational "Rocks Off," but "Exile on Main St." does feature plenty of light and shade, such as the gospel-inspired "Shine a Light" — one of the few moments on the album where Jagger's vocals step out of the mix and take center stage — and the personal, vulnerable "Soul Survivor," which fans have long speculated is about the relationship between Jagger and Richards that had grown strained (though Jagger denied that this was the inspo). But the Stones have always thrived on tension, as the creative high watermark of "Exile on Main St." makes clear.

The Beatles' album discography, which came together in just seven years between 1963 and the band's break up in 1970, has been held up as something of a miracle by musicologists. Though the Fab Four emerged as a fairly typical rock group in the early 60s — albeit with a finely-honed live show, incredible charisma, and a blossoming songwriting talent thanks to the partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney — by the end of the decade they had evolved tremendously, embracing experimentalism and psychedelia and spearheading much of the sound of rock music to come.

Their 1968 double album "The Beatles," affectionately known as "The White Album," shows the band at their most freewheeling, with a plethora of contrasting ideas present on its two discs. The collection of 30 tracks was recorded in the aftermath of the band's trip to India and the tragic death of their manager, Brian Epstein, the year before. Understandably, the Beatles found themselves missing his leadership, with the band's tight group dynamic finally beginning to splinter after experiencing the intensity of Beatlemania together for many years. Indeed, unlike on previous albums, almost half of the songs were recorded without all four members of the band present.

But what results from the chaos is a patchwork of radically disjointed songs that nevertheless count among the boldest artistic choices in the Beatles discography. From the opening Beach Boys pastiche "Back in the U.S.S.R." to the proto heavy metal of "Helter Skelter," from the beauty of John Lennon's paean to his mother "Julia" to the avant-garde intensity of the challenging sound collage "Revolution No. 9," "The White Album" contains an entire world unto itself, and begs to be listened to again and again nearly six decades later.