Editor’s Note: From Albumism’s inception back in 2016, we’ve remained unabashedly and unequivocally passionate about our mission of celebrating the world's love affairs with albums past, present and future.

But while our devotion to the album as an art form has remained steadfast, as evidenced by our deepening repository of individual album tributes and reviews, we’ve admittedly seldom taken the opportunity to explicitly articulate our reverence for the virtues of artists’ complete album repertoires as a whole.

Hence why we’ve decided to showcase what we believe to be the most dynamic discographies of all time in this recurring series. In doing so, we hope to better understand the broader creative context within which our most beloved individual albums exist, while acknowledging the full breadth of their creators’ artistry, career arcs, and overall contributions to the ever-evolving musical landscape.

We hope you enjoy this series and be sure to check here periodically for the latest installments.

THE WHO

September 13, 2019. I’m at Fenway Park on what turns out to be the first cold night of autumn, way up in the nosebleeds, as The Who take the stage. They open with “Overture,” the first track from their iconic rock opera Tommy (1969), and the stadium is immediately transported to another universe.

This is the power of The Who’s work—each album is so exceptional in its sound and vision that you can be dropped into a unified world with just a few notes. Some people will tell you that albums like Tommy are pretentious, that they are born out of a musician’s fragility and need to be taken seriously. This might be true. But it’s also the case that there’s no way that we get to where Tommy could take us if The Who had not made it their mission to stretch what rock music even is.

The early work, everything from The Who Sings My Generation through The Who Sell Out, pulls a stable rock & roll foundation in a few different directions. The debut record fills conventional blue-eyed soul songs with impenetrable swaths of guitar feedback, simply unbelievable drum parts, and on one spectacular occasion, a bass solo. While the follow-up, A Quick One (1966), is slightly weaker on a songwriting front, it does carry an ace up its sleeve: a ten-minute narrative composed of six short songs that would serve as a precursor for Pete Townshend’s future narrative songwriting.

On The Who Sell Out, the group committed fully to the concept album format posited by The Beatles on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and put out a record that mimicked the format of pirate radio stations, complete with jingles. Not only is the concept good, but The Who Sell Out also brings a sharp edge to pop music in the form of “I Can See for Miles,” “Relax,” and the phenomenal and underrated “Rael.” This challenging of conventions at the song and album level set the stage for what was to come.

From 1969 to 1973, The Who reinvented themselves three different times on Tommy, Who’s Next and Quadrophenia. These albums are alike in their ambition, sustained vision, technical ingenuity, and musical virtuosity, but they have fundamentally different sounds. Basically, this run is an almost-unparalleled creative series in any artist’s discography.

Tommy is symphonic, often acoustic, and thereby a pronounced shift away from the Maximum R&B aesthetic that characterized the early work. Still, the foundation of the band’s sound—Keith Moon’s unpredictable and magnificent drumming—remains at the center, becoming its own section of the orchestra. The music itself is menacing (“Cousin Kevin”), fun (“Sally Simpson”), psychedelic (“Sparks”), theatrical (“1921”), and moving (“We’re Not Gonna Take It”). Even when pushing rock & roll to limits that nobody even knew that it had, they could still wield the instrumental and songwriting prowess that made them the best club band in London —but with a different aesthetic.

After touring Tommy, Townshend conceived an even more complex rock opera called Lifehouse, with a spiritual, sci-fi storyline that never cohered in a way that an album could support. Many of the Lifehouse songs became Who’s Next, making it maybe the best outtakes album of all time. While Who’s Next does not have the narrative coherence of its predecessor or successor, it marks a few more important milestones for The Who: pioneering early synthesizer technology (“Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again”) and translating the complex instrumental interplay from Tommy to a more recognizable rock aesthetic (“The Song Is Over,” “Getting in Tune”).

Quadrophenia would then embody everything the band had done until that point, combining the symphonic character of Tommy, the technical wizardry of Who’s Next, and the unhinged rock & roll energy of the early work into a coherent statement.

What happened next is harder to narrativize. The Who put out two more albums before Moon died in 1978, both without a grand narrative structure—the introspective The Who by Numbers (1976) and a more haphazard effort in Who Are You (1978). After Moon’s death, the center of the band was pulled out. Some selections from Face Dances (1981) and It’s Hard (1982) benefit from new drummer Kenny Jones’ stability – the group even demonstrates brief interest in groove on “Eminence Front”—but it certainly doesn’t sound like The Who any longer. Same goes for the two post-Entwistle efforts, Endless Wire (2006) and Who (2019).

At the end of the day, this late-career work does not tarnish The Who’s reputation as a foundational rock & roll sound, inspiring acts from everything from prog-rock to punk. The catalogue remains ambitious and visceral.

Jeremy’s 3 Favorite Who Albums of All Time:

1. Quadrophenia (1973)
2. Tommy (1969)
3. Who’s Next (1971)

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