Every Beck Album, Ranked
In the 1960s, Bibbe Hansen was a visual artist and part of the in-crowd at Andy Warhol’s Factory, while her husband, David Campbell, was a viola player and string arranger who worked on classic albums by Carole King and Marvin Gaye. In 1970, they produced Beck Hansen, whose artsy Los Angeles upbringing was in no small part responsible for his becoming one of the oddest and most original platinum-selling recording artists of the 1990s.
Armed with an acoustic guitar, a sampler and an 8-track, Beck took the world by storm in 1994 with the zeitgeist-defining slacker anthem “Loser.” Though it’s still his only top 10 single in America, “Loser” was just the beginning for Beck, who later received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year for 1996’s Odelay and 1999’s Midnite Vultures, and finally won the award for 2014’s Morning Phase. Over the last three decades, Beck has been an acoustic troubadour, an absurdist rapper and a journeyman rock star, truly occupying a category of his own in the music industry.
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In celebration of the recent 30th anniversary of the release of his acclaimed indie folk album One Foot in the Grave, we explore the robust discography of this ever-peculiar singer and songwriter.
14. Golden Feelings (1993)
Beck’s first full-length was issued on cassette by the small California label Sonic Enemy, and unlike his other early indie albums, he has never seemed interested in letting Golden Feelings stay in print or get reissued. Perhaps that’s because it’s so lo-fi that it’s often hard to listen to, full of whimsical anti-folk songs and experiments with noise drones and vocal distortion. Some tracks were reprised on later albums, such as Mellow Gold’s “Motherfucker” and Stereopathetic Soulmanure’s “No Money No Honey,” while half-baked numbers like the seven-minute “Heartland Feeling” sound like they were never meant to reach the world beyond the Silver Lake coffee shops where he was then performing. Golden Feelings is mostly interesting in that it’s hard to believe the same artist who made it scored a giant pop hit less than a year later.
13. Modern Guilt (2008)
Now and then, a hip new producer comes along with whom every aging legacy artist wants to work to revitalize their careers. After the success of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton became that producer, presiding over some of the most uninspired albums ever released by U2, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and, unfortunately, Beck. Modern Guilt trudges along with a series of clunky Danger Mouse drum loops, while Beck’s strangely expressionless vocal performances seldom bring the tracks to life. At least “Orphans” and “Walls” are brightened a little with backing vocals by Cat Power’s Chan Marshall. A few years later, Beck explained that a serious back injury, sustained during the filming of the “E-Pro” video, influenced the sound of his voice on Modern Guilt, telling Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, “It hurt to sing. I’m whispering through half of those vocals.”
12. Stereopathetic Soulmanure (1994)
Major label contracts are often pretty restrictive about allowing artists to simultaneously release music on other labels. Somehow, when Beck signed with the David Geffen Company in early 1994, they reached an unusual agreement that allowed him to issue two indie albums during the same year as his Geffen debut, Mellow Gold. Stereopathetic Soulmanure, released by the L.A. label/zine Flipside, compiles a variety of lo-fi recordings Beck made from 1988 to 1993, and it feels like a freewheeling scrapbook of all the different sounds and ideas he’d synthesize into something more concise and accessible in his major label work. From squealing guitar noise on “Rollins Power Sauce” to larks such as “Satan Gave Me a Taco,” Stereopathetic Soulmanure rarely takes itself seriously. One of the few conventional songs on the album, “Rowboat,” was covered by Johnny Cash in 1996.
11. Guero (2005)
Beck’s third album produced by the Dust Brothers’ John King and Mike Simpson lacks the jolt of unpredictability and humor that animated Odelay and Midnite Vultures. Instead, there’s a streak of melancholy and pastoral beauty evident on the sweeping string arrangement on “Missing” by Beck’s father, and a mournful lyric about Elliott Smith on “Broken Drum.” Still, the trio’s return to sampledelic pop was welcomed with open arms: “E-Pro” and “Girl” dominated alternative radio, and Guero debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, Beck’s highest charting album to date. “Beck darts around the musical map like an animated flea,” Andy Gill wrote in The Independent’s review of Guero.
10. Hyperspace (2019)
In early 2019, Beck filed for divorce from Marissa Ribisi, his wife of more than 14 years and the mother of his two children. Those who might have expected his next album to be a Sea Change-style collection of sad ballads instead received Hyperspace, a bright and synth-driven album primarily co-produced by hip-hop hitmaker Pharrell Williams. Williams, like Beck, is a genuine weirdo with a gift for mixing and matching genres with a retro/futuristic flair, and it’s a kick to hear them find common ground. The result is spacey and minimalist, with Beck mostly singing rather than rapping, and only “Chemical” and “Saw Lightning” are remotely danceable.
9. Morning Phase (2014)
Often, the Recording Academy won’t get around to recognizing major artists for its highest honor until they’re well past their prime: Steely Dan won their only Grammy for Album of the Year for Two Against Nature (approximately nobody’s favorite Steely Dan album) and Eric Clapton and Tony Bennett both won for their MTV Unplugged releases. Beck joined that club in 2015 when Morning Phase claimed the honor amid arguably more deserving nominees such as Beyonce’s self-titled album. Morning Phase, a “companion album” to Sea Change with many of the same collaborators, was heavily promoted by Capitol Records as Beck’s first album for the label. “Blue Moon” and “Morning” are striking and beautiful songs, but Morning Phase just doesn’t have the emotional charge, or the thrill of hearing Beck venture into new territory, that made Sea Change so beloved.
8. Colors (2017)
In 2003, Greg Kurstin began playing keyboards in Beck’s touring band. By the time he co-produced and co-wrote a Beck album 14 years later, Kurstin had become a massive hitmaker, producing No. 1 songs for Adele, Kelly Clarkson and Sia. Colors benefits from a collaborator who has a history with Beck as well as firm footing in contemporary pop, and it’s a breezy, summery album full of smooth surfaces and radio-friendly singles such as “Dreams.” It’s got a little less personality than Beck’s very best albums, but it never gets boring, as Kurstin keeps throwing in novel textures such as tack piano and mellotron on “Dear Life” or the wheezing synths of “Wow.” “As his first upbeat album in nearly a decade, Colors proves that Beck is still one of rock’s most intrepid inventors,” Eric Renner Brown wrote in the Entertainment Weekly review.
7. Mutations (1998)
Beck’s unique Geffen deal, which allowed him to release indie albums outside his contact, created a small conflict in 1998. Beck recorded an acoustic album for Bong Load Records, intended as a stopgap release before his proper follow-up to Odelay. However, DGC heard the album, which was considerably more polished than One Foot in the Grave and recorded with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, and decided it was worthy of a major- label push. Mutations is a strange record – musically sedate but often as lyrically absurd and free associative as Beck’s hip-hop-influenced albums. The Brazilian rhythms of the single “Tropicalia” and the noise rock ambush of the hidden track “Diamond Bollocks” do a lot to liven up an album that’s sometimes too sleepy for its own good.
6. The Information (2006)
After producing the mellow Mutations and Sea Change, Godrich told Beck that he wanted to make “a hip-hop record.” The result, The Information, is Beck’s most underrated album, summoning the playful spirit of Odelay with more live instruments than samples. The jangly country rock of “Strange Apparitions” sits alongside the sitar-dappled psychedelia of “Soldier Jane” and the blippy loops of “Motorcade” on an album that creates a surprisingly cohesive sound out of Beck’s usually chaotic mash of influences.
5. Sea Change (2002)
In 2000, Beck turned 30 and split with his girlfriend of nine years. Soon, he began writing a set of songs that would join the pantheon of great breakup albums, shedding the cryptic wordplay that was ubiquitous even on his previous acoustic records for the surprising vulnerability of “Guess I’m Doing Fine.” Beck is still a magpie on Sea Change, channeling Serge Gainsbourg on “Paper Tiger” and the desolation of Neil Young’s “Ditch” trilogy on “The Golden Age,” but for once the emotional content seems to drive the sonic character of the album. “Like those tan and shaggy boys who rode the Ventura Highway on a horse with no name, he’s mapping a mythic California where cowboys and girls ditch their pasts in a desert of rent-o-car dreams,” wrote Will Hermes in the SPIN review of Sea Change.
4. Midnite Vultures (1999)
Beck’s second album produced by the Dust Brothers amps up the campy retro aesthetic for an audacious collection of funk pastiches including “Debra,” a comical falsetto slow jam that had been a live favorite since 1996. It’s perhaps the one time Beck tipped into irony overload, and “Hollywood Freaks” in particular plays more like a mocking caricature of hip-hop and R&B tropes than fond homage. Midnite Vultures still has more hits than misses, with the delirious, anything-goes spirit on “Milk & Honey” and “Mixed Bizness” making it easy to enjoy.
3. One Foot in the Grave (1994)
In 1994, while Beck had the song of the summer and Mellow Gold was cruising to platinum sales, he quietly released a lo-fi folk album with one of the hippest indie labels on the planet, Olympia, Wa.’s K Records. Recorded in Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Studio with the Beat Happening frontman frequently croaking background vocals, One Foot in the Grave is the culmination of Beck’s years in the anti-folk scene. Weaving songs by Skip James and the Carter Family into his originals, Beck demonstrates a deep knowledge of American music but an irreverent attitude about his own place in it. Only Beck could write a song called “Asshole” that was so disarmingly lovelorn that it made perfect sense for Tom Petty to cover it.
2. Mellow Gold (1994)
Beck was 23 when “Loser” hit MTV heavy rotation, but looked even younger. The media was eager to anoint him as a new boy wonder who was pulling folk music into the future via hip-hop and indie rock, or a new Bob Dylan who was different from all the new Dylans who had come before. With slack-jawed bangers such as “Fuckin With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)” and “Soul Suckin’ Jerk,” Mellow Gold may be the goofiest album that ever turned someone into the voice of their generation, but it still feels like a foundational text of ‘90s youth culture. “His album barely contains an exuberant experimenter whose verbiage coheres on record – either because he knows records are history or because repetition tamps down the loose ends,” wrote Robert Christgau in the Village Voice review of Mellow Gold.
1. Odelay (1996)
The Dust Brothers were a little too far ahead of their time in 1989, when they produced the second Beastie Boys album Paul’s Boutique and its busy patchwork of samples baffled most fans of Licensed To Ill. Seven years later, the production duo helped create another sampledelic symphony for Beck’s second album, and it was right on time. Odelay doubled the sales of Mellow Gold, topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll and was nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. Beck’s insouciant charisma and strangely compelling word salad, influenced by hip-hop but not entirely beholden to it, turned the Dust Brothers’ crate-digging bricolage into irresistible pop songs such as “Where It’s At” and “The New Pollution.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
