I just played American Idiot and The Wall from start to finish. For me, both are absolute masterpieces. I wouldn’t be able to say which is better than the other.
What’s the best concept album for you?
I just played American Idiot and The Wall from start to finish. For me, both are absolute masterpieces. I wouldn’t be able to say which is better than the other.
What’s the best concept album for you?
If you’re into indie rock, I highly recommend Separation Sunday by The Hold Steady and The Monitor by Titus Andronicus.
They’re both very high-brow (or pretentious, depending on who you ask), but for my money the musicianship and the lyrics just keep me coming back.
Separation Sunday is all about growing up and doing sketchy stuff, finding/losing the faith you grew up with, and finding/losing friends to death, jail, and life.
The Monitor uses the story of an ironclad from the American Civil War as a metaphor for the internal struggle of a 19yo trying to leave his blue-collar roots behind and go to an Ivy League school. If you’ve ever felt that internal divide between who you are and who you want to be, it’s a fantastic album. Shades of Bruce Springsteen with some modern punk.
Speaking of Springsteen, Born to Run could be considered a concept album and it’s a classic, especially if you’ve ever felt the bone-deep need to get away from everything about your home town.
There are a lot of other great suggestions in this thread (especially Good Kid, MAAD City), but they’re mostly the standard “best 50 concept albums of all time” that you see in lots of music journalism, so I wanted to make sure my favorites got seen, too.