In 1975, the music industry was a world in transition. Classic rockers who defined the 1960s were gone or falling out of favor. Thrilling new genres, like punk and disco, were bubbling up in regional scenes, on the verge of breaking into the mainstream. Newly minted stars, like poet-turned-rocker Patti Smith and Jersey sensation Bruce Springsteen, were reshaping what rock stardom looked like. Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Live! album, recorded at the Lyceum Ballroom in London, underscored the ascendance of reggae. Emerging technologies like sampling and drum machines were altering the sound of popular music. 

“It’s almost like [1975 was] the quintessentially '70s year, because you have a lot of slicker sounds you associate with the times being countered with some of the rougher or experimental things,” says veteran rock critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, a founding editor of the online music database AllMusic and author of the pop music-focused newsletter So It Goes. “You get to see the singer-songwriters start to get more sophisticated. The outgrowth of proto-punk starts to show up. Also, there’s a real consolidation of the professional polish. A lot of studio craft is happening.” 

These 14 albums not only reveal the myriad directions music was taking in 1975, but they remain deeply relevant half a century later.

Long before they became ’90s MTV darlings, Aerosmith were New England’s foremost purveyors of down-and-dirty hard rock, with Joe Perry’s gritty guitar licks and Steven Tyler’s squawking vocals forming a matched set. The group’s third album, Toys in the Attic, consummated their rise and captured a fleeting artistic sweet spot: a triumphant window after they perfected their blues-rock songcraft but before they flamed out in a drug-addled haze. As Aerosmith bassist Tom Hamilton told Spin in 2015, “It’s the album where the band first…learned how to make a record, how to use the studio.” Its best tracks, including the proto-rap “Walk This Way” and slyly psychedelic “Sweet Emotion,” remain radio staples to this day.

Bowie was a major star long before 1975, but Young Americans established him as a true pop chameleon. The album reinvented the androgynous glam-rocker as an R&B soul crooner, funking it up with ex-Beatle John Lennon on “Fame,” reveling in African American culture on the silky smooth, sax-filled title track and converting the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” into a syrupy blue-eyed soul ballad. Not quite embraced by critics upon release, the record’s “plastic soul” (Bowie’s term) nonetheless helped him break through with American audiences and led the way to his more ambitious Station to Station a year later. 

Nobody expected Bob Dylan to make what some call his greatest album a full decade after Highway 61 Revisited. Probably not even Dylan himself, who composed the songs that would become Blood on the Tracks while navigating a separation and eventual divorce from then-wife Sara Dylan. The songwriter has denied an autobiographical component, but there’s no denying the waves of sorrow (“You’re a Big Girl”), anger (“Idiot Wind”), and lonesome yearning (“If You See Her, Say Hello”) that ripple through Dylan’s arguably most open-hearted album. The modern category of the divorce album—which found a messier prototype a few years later in Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours—essentially began here. Interestingly, Blood on the Tracks was one of two classic albums Dylan released in 1975; the other, largely recorded eight years earlier with The Band, was The Basement Tapes.

On Another Green World, Brian Eno seems to be suspended halfway between the art rock of his Roxy Music days and the ambient sound he would pioneer by the decade’s end. But instead of feeling transitional or uncertain, the album feels peerless and unmoored from time. Each song seems to conjure a new genre out of thin air: the avant-funk of “Sky Saw,” the buzzing experimental pop of “St. Elmo’s Fire,” the hypnotic drone of “The Big Ship”—all light years ahead of their time. 

Solo piano recordings don’t usually sell four4 million copies, but The Köln Concert is a remarkable exception. Recorded in the titular city late one night in early 1975, in a concert that Jarrett almost canceled, these transcendent, improvisational movements, which often find the pianist vamping over deceptively simple two-chord progressions, captured jazz fans’ hearts and established Jarrett as an in-demand piano virtuoso. The imperfect nature of the recording, which lets you hear Jarrett’s ecstatic grunts and pedal thumps, makes you feel like you’re in the audience, witnessing the concert yourself. 

Funk, disco and soul mingle freely together on the second album from KC and the Sunshine Band, an indelible collection that packs myriad hooks in under 30 minutes. With this album, the multiracial group scored two No. 1 hits and filled a radio void left by Sly and the Family Stone’s slide into a druggy funk haze. You may think you haven’t heard this album, but the cultural ubiquitousness of “That's the Way (I Like It)” and “Get Down Tonight”—in commercials, sporting events and movie needle drops—ensures that they’ll sound familiar anyway. 

By 1975, Led Zeppelin were veritable rock gods, trashing hotel suites, selling out stadiums and embellishing their stage show with lasers and dry ice. As the band got bigger, so did the albums, culminating with Physical Graffiti, an immense, sprawling double album that boasts three songs stretching past the eight-minute mark. Eclecticism reigns, with its best songs—the James Brown-esque funk stomper “Trampled Under Foot,” the Eastern-enamored “Kashmir,” the twangy “Down by the Seaside”—reinventing listeners’ conceptions of who Zeppelin were and what they could sound like. 

Few artists transformed their sound as mightily between 1970 and 1975 as Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell, who immersed herself in freewheeling jazz-pop fusion as a backdrop for these sneakily complex songs of feminist malaise. Stretching beyond folk-rock instrumentation, as she had on Court and Spark, Mitchell grew more musically restless, incorporating congas and Dobro resonator guitar on the anti-patriarchal “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” and sampling an African percussion loop on the remarkably ahead-of-its-time “The Jungle Line.” It has some sonic overlap with Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years (also released in 1975), which “isn’t quite jazz, but has that same sort of sophisticated vibe for singer-songwriters,” says rock critic Erlewine. “There’s definitely this lane that’s opening up, where it’s not just the guitar and the voice.” 

George Clinton delivers 500,000 kilowatts of P. Funk power on this intergalactic funk masterpiece, which put Parliament on the map as the equal of Clinton’s better-known sister act, Funkadelic. A concept album about Black people visiting extraterrestrial worlds in outer space, Mothership Connection’s visionary imagery, relentless grooves, and rap-like chants (“Make my funk the P. Funk/I want my funk uncut!”) made it a popular sample source for hip-hop legends. Afrofuturism has never sounded funkier. (“Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip / And come on up to the Mothership.”) The iconic “Mothership” itself, constructed as a stage prop for Parliament’s concerts, now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.

Deliberately overblown, genre-hopping rock and roll like this didn’t have much of a precedent before 1975. With their fourth album, A Night at the Opera, Queen proved they could take serious-minded genres like progressive rock and heavy metal and filter them through a fun, flamboyant vision of their own, led by Freddie Mercury’s star appeal. Often cited as the most expensive album of its day (and a make-or-break endeavor for a band in debt and on the verge of folding), A Night at the Opera channeled Queen’s ambition into wildly different genre experiments—the testosterone rock of “I’m in Love with my Car,” the kaleidoscopic pop of “You’re my Best Friend,” the bombastic six-minute opera of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—and catapulted the British group to international fame. 

Plenty of restless poets have dabbled in rock music, but few have emerged with a debut as potent and era-defining as Horses. Patti Smith merged the freewheeling poetry of her Beat generation idols, the disaffected cool of the Velvet Underground, the improvisatory spirit of free jazz and the raw energy of the nascent punk movement to create a proto-punk masterpiece. With one of the greatest opening lines of all time—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” she drawls on “Gloria”—Horses established Smith as poet laureate of the downtown CBGB scene. In 2010, the Library of Congress added the album to its National Recording Registry as a historically significant work.

Bruce Springsteen’s blockbuster third album was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Boss sang about all-American characters yearning to break free from their “death trap” hometowns and realize their romantic dreams. With the rousing, widescreen anthems of Born to Run—from the R&B-flavored “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” to the epic “Jungleland” to the instantly recognizable title track—Springsteen realized his own dreams, making the leap from acclaimed singer-songwriter to outright rock star, achieving worldwide fame and becoming a poet laureate of the New Jersey working underclass. “Born to Run is really where he goes cinematic,” says Erlewine. “He uses a huge canvas for both the songs and the production itself. It feels like there’s this sense of possibility.”

1975 was the year that the nascent disco genre began creeping out of the dance clubs and into the mainstream. For American listeners, the disco revolution began not with a bang but with the cooing come-ons and orgasmic moans of Donna Summer, whose 17-minute collaboration with producer, composer and synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder, “Love to Love You Baby,” met with bans from some radio stations but became a major hit anyway. That hot-and-heavy cut, with its disco-defining four-on-the-floor rhythm, occupies an entire side of this sophomore album; side B makes room for sensual ballads like “Full of Emptiness” and “Whispering Waves.” 

By his own account, Neil Young “headed for the ditch” with his mid-’70 trilogy of brooding, downbeat masterpieces. Recorded in 1973 but shelved until 1975, Tonight's the Night, the final entry of this “Ditch Trilogy,” was a kind of drunken wake in album form, a vehicle for Young to grieve the drug-related deaths of guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. Its raw emotion is unnerving but also captivating. As the singer’s voice cracks and shakes on “Mellow my Mind,” he sounds like a man with nothing left to lose.