10 Most Ambitious Albums of All Time

Image via Harvest Records Published Aug 4, 2026, 7:15 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Ambition is easy to talk about when it comes to books, because you can take a look at a bookshelf and see which ones are nice and chunky (here’s looking at you, War and Peace). If you're measuring ambition and looking at movies, you probably don’t have access to film reels to see which ones are the longest, given that something being shot and projected on film is rare nowadays, but you can glance over movies that are considered epics, and chances are, many of the biggest and most expansive in that genre will be overflowing with ambition. And then with albums, it’s also worth looking at length and track count, but not exclusively. An album can be ambitious because it cost a lot, or it had a good many guest musicians appearing on it, or because it tackled a huge number of genres all at once. The ones below do these sorts of things, in one way or another, in turn making them arguably the most ambitious albums ever made. 10 'Quadrophenia' (1973) The Who Tommy is possibly the album that felt more forward-thinking for its time, being a concept album that was also a double album, but The Who’s best and most ambitious work is actually Quadrophenia. In both cases, the albums inspired movies, though the Tommy movie is more directly a film adaptation of the album and the story it tells, while the movie based on Quadrophenia is more inspired by – or spiritually/thematically in line with – it. Like, it’s harder to pin down a narrative here, with Quadrophenia, beyond addressing the things it touches upon, and then there are certainly songs that are lyrically focused on particular characters or incidents. You do feel the cinematic quality of it all, though, and then Quadrophenia proves ambitious in its sound as well as what it tackles lyrically, also managing to do everything in a surprisingly consistent and easy-to-approach manner. 9 'The Dark Side of the Moon' (1973) Pink Floyd It was tempting to put The Wall here, because that is a longer album, it has more of a narrative, and there’s a whole movie and live show attached to it that enhances the experience of that original album, but also, Pink Floyd was the band behind The Dark Side of the Moon. Further, The Dark Side of the Moon is an album that feels all-encompassing, touching upon an overwhelming number of things to paint a portrait of how life is overwhelming, stressful, and despair-filled. Nothing here’s feel-good, in other words, unless you get swept up in how good the whole thing sounds, and yeah, it is beautiful with its music while the lyrics are consistently soul-crushing. The Dark Side of the Moon might well be the ultimate concept album, with Pink Floyd biting off a lot here, in terms of what the album’s going for, yet it was all very much chewed and digested rather effortlessly. 8 'Sandinista' (1980) The Clash The album here that probably comes the closest to being too much is Sandinista, which felt like a very purposeful attempt on the part of The Clash to do something bigger (though not necessarily better) than London Calling. That 1979 album was one of the best of all time, doing so much as a blend of rock, punk, a bit of new wave, and some other genres thrown in for good measure. It’s an album that houses some of The Clash’s best songs alongside some of the worst songs you might well ever hear, and then everything in between. London Calling was a double album, and perfectly eclectic, whereas Sandinista ended up being a triple album, with six songs on each of the six sides, and a total runtime of nearly 2.5 hours. It’s an album that houses some of The Clash’s best songs alongside some of the worst songs you might well ever hear, and then everything in between. It plays around with a few too many genres, very much not tackling all of them with equal care. Still, if you like The Clash, then you will like at least some of Sandinista, for whatever that might be worth. 7 'Invincible' (2001) Michael Jackson For better or worse (mostly for worse), you get the sense that no one got to tell Michael Jackson “no” during the production of Invincible, because it is overwhelmingly packed with a bit of everything. There’s a chaotic mix of genres and ideas here, with Invincible being about as long as it could be for a single CD release, and plenty of the songs running long by pop music standards and also sounding cluttered and kind of messy as far as the production’s concerned. There’s too much jammed in here, and you almost wish it could overflow, but it’s all so compressed, crammed, and loud. It’s not a good album, with the ambition here being unchecked yet undeniable, a bit like how naysayers describe Heaven’s Gate (for a film comparison). Still, misguided ambition is ambition, and also, Invincible is noted for being the most expensive album of all time, so that contributes to it deserving a spot in this particular ranking. 6 'Illinois' (2005) Sufjan Stevens In hindsight, the idea that Illinois was part of a 50-state project by Sufjan Stevens that would involve him making an album about every single U.S. State seems ridiculous, but he had done Michigan two years earlier, and both it and Illinois were fantastic. If anyone could commit to such an undertaking, it would be Stevens, who’s one of those out-of-this-world singular artists who really does seem endlessly creative and talented. Even knowing the 50-state project was a joke, it’s easy to look back on Illinois and see it as remarkably ambitious nonetheless. So much by way of historical events, sounds, and personal stories are woven into this album, and it all flows incredibly well for something that’s almost the length of a movie, in the end. Illinois succeeds in making you feel like you’ve taken a trip around the entire state and visited the majority of its museums and significant locations, all in a bit over 70 minutes, and it does all that while sounding so consistently beautiful, too. 5 'Since I Left You' (2000) The Avalanches Since I Left You is a plunderphonics album, and that’s not really a household name, as far as genres go, but that’s probably because it’s hard to do plunderphonics music right. It involves using samples of pre-existing music to build new songs, and Since I Left You does that for all of its tracks, many of them bleeding together seamlessly to create the sensation of listening to one epic-length (and hour-long) song. The experience is certainly more immersive and cinematic than you'd find on most other albums, and trying to think about how Since I Left You was pieced together so effectively proves head-spinning. The Avalanches have released two pretty great albums since this one (2016’s Wildflower and 2020’s We Will Always Love You), though neither's as reliant on samples, and Since I Left You does still feel like it stands tall as the best (and most important) album the group’s done. 4 'Random Access Memories' (2013) Daft Punk A little like The Avalanches, Daft Punk is a duo where their earliest music was sample-heavy, and then what ended up being their final album, Random Access Memories, proved a bit more organic, even if it definitely had some samples. This album’s here, though, instead of Discovery just because Daft Punk did this switch-up in style and sound so seamlessly. Random Access Memories still sounds like Daft Punk, and plenty of the songs scratch the same itch as the best tracks from Discovery and the duo’s earlier albums, yet the escalation in ambition here, with this 2013 album, is mind-blowing. There’s a lot of perfect music here, with Random Access Memories being about 75 minutes long, and even with a fair few tracks being lengthy, you don’t ever really feel like there’s any sort of negative repetition, nor things being dragged out for longer than needed. 3 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' (2010) Kanye West One of the most maximalist albums of the 21st century so far is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and it feels like once the century is over, it'll remain feeling especially grand, bombastic, and maximalist in scope and sound. It feels destined to be one of those albums people talk about decades from now, and in the 16 years since it came out, it still feels hard to wrap your head around it entirely. The ever-controversial Kanye West balances introspection and passionate emotions about external things here, addressing a great many things and also featuring tons of guests without My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy ever feeling overcrowded or too messy. It’s just the right kind of sprawling and messy, where the chaos feels purposeful and there’s that ever-desirable blending of variety and consistency. Just how it all sounds can’t really be done justice with words, so if you’ve never listened to it before (somehow), or if you’ve not listened to it in its entirety for a while, it’s very much worth getting around to doing just that. 2 'Songs in the Key of Life' (1976) Stevie Wonder If you only listened to Songs in the Key of Life, and then nothing else by Stevie Wonder, you'd definitely be missing out on a good many incredible songs… but you'd probably have a good understanding of Wonder’s musical genius in any event. There’s nearly 90 minutes of music here, with long songs that tackle a wide range of subjects, and then there’s also a consistency to the sound and quality while different songs have very different levels of energy. The way Songs in the Key of Life is paced proves kind of otherworldly, because you start it, and you look at how long it is, and the idea of getting through such an album seems intimidating, but then the time flashes right by. It would be an understatement to call it one of the best albums of its era, and it also feels right to call it perhaps the very best non-rock album of the 1970s, too (and, honestly, there are plenty of full-blown “classic” classic rock albums from that time that some of this album technically rocks harder than). 1 'The Beatles' (1968) The Beatles It took The Beatles years to release a self-titled album, and it happened toward the end of the band’s lifespan, in the end, with 1968’s The Beatles, which is sometimes called The White Album. This one more than earns the right to be self-titled, since it sums up pretty much every sound The Beatles ever explored throughout their time together as a band, and then a few sounds/genres that they didn’t really explore, other than on this album. The Beatles is a double album, albeit longer than most double albums, exceeding 90 minutes, and having a total of 30 songs of varying lengths and genres/styles. It’s pretty dizzying to take in all of The Beatles (1968) in one sitting, so other albums the band put out might technically be more replayable, yet for sheer ambition – and for containing a brazen sort of confidence – it’s ultimately the band’s most surprising and overwhelming.