Best vinyl records to test your turntable in 2025: Essential albums to build out your collection

Picking just one album by The Beatles to highlight wasn't an easy task, but after whittling down the list, I arrived at Abbey Road as a great option to whack on your turntable - in particular the 50th anniversary reissue.

This version features the 2019 stereo album mix, sourced from the original eight-track session tapes, with Giles Martin working alongside Sam Okell on production. As you would imagine Abbey Road sounds terrific, with the mix balanced beautifully allowing John, Paul, George and Ringo’s talents to really shine.

A real treat, and it’s even better when you take in the amount off wonderful songs here, including the brilliant Come Together, the quirky Octopus’s Garden and the timeless classic Here Comes The Sun.

Metallica’s much-loved “Black Album” launched in 1991 just as grunge was clearing the launchpad, but if anyone though the arrival of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins could dent the popularity of metal’s finest, they were wrong.

Gone were many of the thrash stylings that Metallica were known for, with the band delivering a slow-burning thumper of a record that's possibly their most famous alongside Master Of Puppets. Enter Sandman sounds fabulous on the vinyl reissue, while The Unforgiven is another majestic track which truly shines.

I'm also giving a special mention to Nothing Else Matters, as it has plenty of room to blossom here, with James Hetfield’s vocals rising above the crescendo.

OK, so we could have gone for Appetite For Destruction or Use Your Illusion I & II, but I've picked Guns N’ Roses’ Greatest Hits package instead. This was originally released on CD in 2004, with this double vinyl edition release in September 2020. It's pressed on 180g black vinyl and also features the 1986 recording of Shadow Of Your Love, which surfaced on the 2018 box set of Appetite. Greatest Hits was also released on gold coloured vinyl with red and white splatter – although this is becoming increasing more difficult to get hold of.

There are 15 songs here including Welcome To The Jungle, November Rain, You Could Be Mine and Patience and a final nice touch is the four sides are labelled G, N, F’N, R. Nice!

Ghost leader Tobias Forge has always positioned his band somewhere between metal and classic rock, but their transformation into full-blown AOR-style stadium rockers – a move which began in earnest with 2018’s Prequelle – is now complete with Impera.

It’s an album full of great riffs and massive choruses which bring back memories of the mid-80s rock scene (a golden time for music for me). Kaisarion, is a personal stand-out, with Forge's opening scream instantly reminding me of Stan Bush at his finest. Meanwhile, next song Spillways took me back to listening to Bon Jovi’s Runaway back in 1984.

Impera proves that Ghost are still one of the most exciting bands around… even if they did have to go back in time to the glorious 80s to claim the crown.

Pixies are your favourite band’s favourite band, almost guaranteed. These folks were the genesis of a bajillion genres, themselves gamely combining surf and punk-rock motifs with raw noise-rock sensibility – and Doolittle is one of the best examples of this frenetic polygenre-ism in action. Though it doesn’t quite have the same cool credentials as Surfer Rosa, it holds some of Pixies' best works in its hands. That said, I’m still inclined to go and make a cup of tea when Here Comes Your Man comes on.

The rest of the record makes up for this bleak, regrettable splotch, disavowed even by the band itself; Black Francis’ pained yelps, particularly in Debaser, Tame and Hey, are angst encoolified, and Kim Deal’s bass across the album is amazing. Generally speaking, you feel cooler for listening to this record, and even more so for listening on vinyl.

Nirvana’s iconic performance was filmed and recorded at Sony Music Studios in New York City in November 1993, with the setlist featuring Nirvana staples such as Come As You Are and Polly. However, it also has a number of covers, including David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World and Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam by The Vaselines which helped made the record the definitive offering from the Unplugged series.

The double vinyl released in 2019 to mark the album’s 25th anniversary sounds fantastic, with the music given plenty of room to breathe. About A Girl is terrific with Kurt Cobain vocals sounding gritty and fresh, while On A Plain’s mellow beat shines. There's even a bonus five extra rehearsal tracks.

Tesseract’s fourth studio album Sonder is next on our list, partly because the tracks from the UK outfit are quality and the production work on it is top-drawer. The band’s guitarist Ace Kahney co-produced the 2018 record with Aiden O’Brien and the results are brilliant. Opener Luminary is sharp, with Jay Postones’ drums cutting through the mix beautifully, while the quieter moments simply shine.

Orbital is a gentle, multi-textured track which reminds me of US post rockers Hammock and it sounds magical on vinyl, but my favourite cut on the record is the sprawling 11-minute Beneath My Skin/Mirror Image which ebbs and flows through menacing riffs and clean as a whistle drumming. Sonder might not be an album you expected to see here, but it’ll put your record player through its paces.

“I need a saga. What’s the saga? It’s Songs For The Deaf. You can’t even hear it!” This inimitable introduction is rightfully seared into the minds of millions, unforgettable as it is an opener to The Album of the new millennium.

Queens Of The Stone Age’s Songs For The Deaf is a seminal rock album experience, perfectly distilling two decades of west-coast invention into 60-ish minutes of thick, intoxicating desert rock. This is the 2019 re-pressing of that seminal experience, and the closest you’ll ever get to hearing it for the first time again.

Eric Valentine’s mid-riffic production; Dave Grohl’s metronomic, maximalist drums; Mark Lanegan’s irresistible croon; Josh Homme’s irreplaceable thrift-store guitar tone: all of this and more add up to an album far greater than the sum of its parts.

This best-of list was previously adorned with The Cure’s masterful 1989 gothfest Disintegration, and quite rightly too. In terms of songwriting, there are few better than Robert Smith; whether you’re a Lovecats fan or a sucker for Just Like Heaven, there’s an ethereal quality to The Cure’s songs that just seems to grab at ya - and Songs Of A Lost World is no different.

I knew I was in for something special the moment first single Alone dropped. At once grand and frail, majestic and crumbling, Alone is an Ozymandian tale in Smith’s bell-clear voice (seemingly unchanged over the decades, too). Songs Of A Lost World retains its fragile grandiosity throughout, searing guitars and funereal keys propped up over apocalyptic drums – and in glorious 3D for album highlights Warsong and Endsong.

‘Pub rock’. What a genre. Amyl And The Sniffers are veteran pub-rockers, who’ve only now been given their long-overdue flowers thanks to a growing global interest in the exports of this uniquely Aussie sub-genre; The Chats came so Amyl And The Sniffers could conquer. Cartoon Darkness is the album with which they decided to conquer, its relentless riffery big enough to justify a world tour and then some.

Amy Taylor is a force for chaotic good from 12 seconds in, her motoric vocals replete with expletives cascading over dug-in guitars, hefty bass and impossibly huge drums. What else would you expect, though? After all, Cartoon Darkness was recorded at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios by veteran producer Nick Launey (who's previously worked with artists including Idles, Grinderman and Supergrass) on the desk that recorded Nevermind. Pub-rock goes global.

Mark Lanegan’s 2004 album Bubblegum is a doom-and-gloom tour-de-force. Lanegan’s voice is singular, both literally and with respect to his songwriting – lurid, soft and heartfelt despite its sharp edges. PJ Harvey’s drop-ins on Hit The City and Come To Me are powerful and, to say the least, fitting for a record steeped in bittersweetness.

This 2024 re-release, Bubblegum XX is gloriously expansive, adding 12 unreleased tracks to a beautifully-remastered double-LP cut of the original album and a bundled-in remaster of the rarities album Here Comes That Weird Chill. So gloriously expansive is this release that it made our list of 2024’s best vinyl reissues. That bittersweetness is all the more potent, too, for Lanegan’s untimely passing in 2022. Listen forwards and weep.

PJ Harvey’s 1993 album Rid Of Me is a common feature in eclectic best-of lists. There’s something ineffable about it, being such a simplistic album with such a magnetic pull. Some of that magnetism can, of course, be attributed to Steve Albini – but his talent lay in nakedly rendering the artist as is, which is what makes Rid Of Me such a visceral listen despite its few constituent parts.

Even those intimately familiar with the album will be tripped up by just how long the opener and title track stays quiet, before erupting into raucous life – and this is the story throughout too, Harvey practically begging you to underestimate each track before grabbing your eardrums and giving them a hefty tug. There are highlights aplenty on this record, from the tired lead-lines of Legs to the freneticism of 50ft Queenie – but the whole thing’s a riot, and a masterclass in dynamics to boot.