12 classic albums that define 1989

Updated May 2024

6 Music is celebrating 35 years of The Cure's landmark album Disintegration, with a whole Artist Collection on BBC Sounds dedicated to The Cure, as well as a celebration of the album live on 6 Music all day on 2 May, with nothing but music from 1989.

1989 was not only a pivotal year but also stood at the end of a hugely important decade. Of course, there was plenty of political upheaval making headlines, but also a massive musical revolution, from hip hop to balearic to acid house, that made the year so memorable too.

Here, 6 Music takes a look at twelve classic records from 1989 - from The Cure to Janet Jackson to the Stone Roses.

For their eighth studio album, The Cure dealt with their personal lives (and band) falling apart alongside the pangs of ageing gracefully. With Robert Smith staring down the barrel of his 30th birthday, the record shed a little of the shimmer that had buoyed their success until that point. In returning to the sound of their fourth album Pornography, the dry ice descended upon their gothic-pop once again, but what they couldn’t drown out was their ability to write an infectious hook.

The album remains their most commercially successful and - although reviled by much of the music press at the time - their most critically lauded release, with revisionists like Pitchfork singing its praises and then some. The track ‘Lovesong’ peaked at number 2 in the US Billboard 100, whilst the album reached number 3 in the UK album chart. The success of the record led to the band headlining venues such as the Dodgers Stadium in New York, much to Smith’s chagrin: “The stadium was too big for us to take it all in. We've decided that we don't like playing stadiums that large. It was never our intention to become as big as this." He later added that they had "despite my best efforts, actually become everything that I didn't want us to become: a stadium rock band."

Groundbreaking, incendiary, and legendary are just three of the recurring terms that come up when people talk and type about the Beastie Boys’ ambitious and experimental magnum opus. Following the huge success of their debut album Licensed to Ill, the band side-stepped their label Def Jam and producer Rick Rubin to pioneer a new sound. Multi-layered archival samples from skits, rock, and movies (not all of them safe-for-work) created - with a little magic from The Dust Brothers - the perfect palette for the trio’s punk-raps and party hooks. It was a whole new sound that led to Rolling Stone dubbing it the Pet Sounds of hip-hop.

The record’s now iconic cover was an existing clothing store on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow, called Lee’s Sportswear. However, if you stand at 99 Rivington Street now, Manhattan’s Lower East Side looks somewhat different - Lee’s Sportswear is no longer, but a mural of the band was painted at the location in 2014.

Partway through 1989, a bunch of teenagers released a slightly offbeat rock album called The Real Thing. Something a little bit punk, with some sense of groove and strong melodies against unconventional structures. Faith No More are as morphic, sound-wise, as their charismatic frontman Mike Patton. His extraordinary vocals have shaped the sound of the band over the years and stood out even on their earliest effort.

Weird lyrics, dramatic dynamics and a penchant towards the melancholy have seen The Real Thing called metal, rock, indie and everything else anyone can think of to box it into. Probably because at the time, with the end of glam and an emergent grunge scene in the US, calling it what it is would've been hard.

The Real Thing is a glorious, incendiary alt-pop album. Epic, at the heart, is the kind of song you can't really imagine coming back from having written as a teenager - surely anything after could never be as cocksure, as masterful, as straight-up catchy?

Not if you're Mike Patton and Faith No More, of course.

By 1989, Janet Jackson’s record label wanted her to build on the success of her last album, Control - dance–driven, sexy R&B. It was what she was known for, what her image was built around. Instead she created Rhythm Nation 1814 – an ambitious, high-concept album about race, politics and tragedy in the US.

The record produced seven Billboard top 5 singles – more than any other album, ever – and was an enormous commercial success, despite the apparently challenging nature of the subject matter and its interlude-heavy, complex structure.

Debut albums are always statements of intent. Pretty Hate Machine is surely one of the most intense, fully-formed, bone-rattling, fist-shaking, genre-reinvigorating, parent-upsetting and rabble-rousing first albums ever released. Careening effortlessly between devil-may-care rock, the most heavenspun metal, and bleak electronic symphonies, Trent Reznor let the world know he was here and set out his stall in pulsing, gargantuan, all-capital letters.

Musically, it was more of a tsunami of black-sheep than a new wave of metal. The smelting process of turning industrial metal into a series of heavily MTV rotated alternative anthems was assisted by the dark lord of the synth. Super-producer Flood - who had worked with Ministry, Depeche Mode and helped turn U2 into one of the biggest acts on Earth with his production magic on Joshua Tree - helped shape tracks like ‘Head Like A Hole’ (which featured a Prince sample) and ‘Sin’. The resulting album sent out a beacon to a disaffected youth, with the record selling over 3m copies in the US alone. The record also set off a thunderbolt inside of David Bowie, leading to Reznor and The Thin White Duke working together in the 90s.

Trent Reznor says it "remains the work of an artist just discovering his voice" and that "20 years later, it doesn’t warrant repeat listens like its successors." Oscar and multi-Grammy winning Reznor might want to revisit this record again because it remains a masterpiece to a legion of fans.

Few albums manage to sound both too loud and not loud enough, but Doolittle somehow achieves it. It’s also an album that manages to swing from ferocious rage to melodic in the blink of an eye, and quite often at the same time. With waves of surf-rock crashing into punk-rock, weirdo-rock, screaming-folk, and a mutant form of heavy metal known as grunge, Black Francis and co managed to create a fresh sound that would go on to inspire generations of artists - most notably a young Kurt Cobain who’d fuse brash elements of the Pixies with a pinch of Sonic Youth, a little Black Sabbath and a dash of The Beatles’ songwriting nous.

By the time New Order released this, their fifth album, they were already the masters of fusing post-punk guitars with the beats they picked up in clubs around the world.

In some respects, then, ‘Technique’, was business as usual from Sumner, Hook and co. But rather than looking to the warehouses of New York or German synthrock, they turned to Ibiza for inspiration, and the club nights where they heard Acid house alongside novelty pop, Queen and homegrown Spanish tunes.

The resulting album, partly recorded on the island at Peter Hook’s insistence after a series of records made in dark, London basements, is the sound of a band leaving behind their old selves to tread new ground and move beyond the confines of what a four-or-five piece guitar band could achieve.

While the other great Manchester album of 1989, The Stone Roses is credited with ushering in Madchester, ‘Technique’ was no less influential, and 35 years on sounds as fresh and vital as it ever did. It’s a short record too, its brevity part of its brilliance. Don’t pick one or two songs to listen to, dive right in to the whole thing.

Club Classics Vol. One is the kind of title you can only give a record that definitely will be a classic. Soul II Soul's debut has held up to that - not only shaping the sound of the next decade of British R&B but credited with defining a UK Black sound and style.

Singles 'Keep On Movin' and 'Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)' were massive hits - the latter was the fifth best-selling song of 1989, in the UK. They pioneered a distinctive sound that combined dance and electronic elements with soul and funk rhythms, creating an irresistibly confident, modern style.

The band changed its line-up with each subsequent album, so in a way this is the only album they ever released as this iteration. Between Caron Wheeler's distinctive vocals and the slickly confident interweaving of styles across the record, it feels like a standalone, titanic event.

It's almost impossible to believe that it could have been a debut record. The influence of Club Classics Vol. One is still visible on UK R&B and pop, a reach extending across three decades of lush sound.

According to Noel Gallagher, this was the album that "opened the door for British guitar music in the 90s”. The Oasis guitarist told Uncut years after his fellow Manc's album release: "We were credited with the renaissance of British guitar music in the '90s, and I'm having that because we have done a lot for that form of music, but without the Roses... They opened the door for us."

Noel's got a point - it's hard to see how British indie music in the 90s, and beyond, would have been the same without the Stone Roses' self-titled effort. It's an LP that excited as much as it polarised, that harked back to the past as much as it condensed all that was current - as put by SPIN, it contained “a mixture of... the universal melodies of the Beatles, the gorgeously ringing guitars of the Byrds, the cheeky (and quintessentially British) humour of the Smiths, the self-fulfilling arrogance of the Sex Pistols”. Simply put, it's an all-encompassing record with the ability to change lives.

By the time Madonna released her fourth studio album Like a Prayer, she was already a pop megastar - with iconic hits including ‘Like a Virgin’, ‘Into the Groove’ and ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ already under her belt. Despite Madge consistently reshaping how female artists ‘should behave’ and achieving worldwide fame since her debut single in 1982, it wasn’t until Like a Prayer that critics started to appreciate Madonna’s artistry - with the Rolling Stone saying at the time of release ‘as close to art as pop music gets… proof not only that Madonna should be taken seriously as an artist but that hers is one of the most compelling voices of the 1980s’. Over three decades later, art pop is definitely now a thing, and Madonna helped pave the way for countless female artists including Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé.

Like a Prayer is often referred to as one of the greatest albums of all time, and the title track is also considered to be one of Madonna’s best, although the mix of sexual and religious imagery stirred up considerable controversy after its release. Much more than just its famous single, the album spawned other beloved singles such as ‘Express Yourself’ and ‘Cherish’ as well as a Prince collaboration with ‘Love Song’. Overall, the album is a deeply personal, explorative album which saw Madonna at the top of her creative game.

At the time of De La Soul's debut release on 3 March 1989, much of hip hop sounded very different to what the trio had produced. Less than 12 months after Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions and N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton, 3 Feet High and Rising was a light-hearted, zany alternative from three high school friends with samples ranging from Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, Commodores and Johnny Cash.

So ground-breaking was ‘3 Feet High and Rising’, the album was inducted into the United States’ Library of Congress’ National Recording Register in 2010, which selects recordings that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. It's a sprawling, psych-fused voyage, packed with clever skits, an encyclopaedia of samples, and some of the most iconic hip hop tracks of the past few decades, including ‘The Magic Number, ‘Me Myself and I’, and ‘Change in Speak’.

Hats is a record that draws you in and holds your attention, taking you through a cinematic, wistful soundscape of slow-building 80s pop with lyrics exploring love, loss and longing across seven succinct tracks. The expertly crafted album is understated minimalism whilst feeling big, it is melancholic and moody but at times euphoric and powerful.

The Scottish group take their time over each album, having only released 4 albums since forming in 1981. Hats followed five years after their debut album A Walk Across the Rooftops, and during this time they endeavoured to create a body of work they were happy with, leading them to return to their home city of Glasgow. It was here that the band flourished and soon the critically-acclaimed Hats was produced - and you can hear influences of the city everywhere in the album.

Often described as a ‘hidden gem’ from the 80s, Hats is a cult classic which received rave reviews from critics and was voted as Scotland’s favourite ever album in a 2018 poll by The Herald newspaper. It’s the band’s most successful album in both the UK and US, and a whole new audience may be introduced to them now thanks to Taylor Swift namechecking them in her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department.