100 Best Albums
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- 25 JUL 1980
- 10 Songs
- The Razors Edge · 1990
- Back In Black · 1980
- Highway to Hell · 1979
- Back In Black · 1980
- Back In Black · 1980
- Back In Black · 1980
- High Voltage · 1975
- Let There Be Rock · 1977
- High Voltage · 1975
- Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap · 1976
Essential Albums
- 100 Best Albums "Hells Bells" sets a mournful tone with its slow, ominous build, but once Johnson leans into the mic, the band is back in business. From there on out, it's a masterful metal adventure that features some of the heaviest and most fist-pumping music of their career, including "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" and the tune that's probably inspired more late-night sing-alongs than any other, "You Shook Me All Night Long."
- AC/DC had been creating album after album of pulverizing rock 'n' roll for much of the '70s when they released Highway to Hell. If those albums were the sound of them pillaging the club scene, this was where they stormed the gates of the arena. A new producer, Robert "Mutt" Lange, was brought on board to help clean up some of the grime on those riffs, shape the new tunes into more compact forms, and create choruses that hit even harder. The result? "Highway to Hell", "Girls Got Rhythm", "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)". These are songs that defined the way heavy metal and hard rock would be played for decades to come. This multi-platinum album ensured that the name AC/DC would be scrawled on every teenager's desk for the foreseeable future.
- Released at a time when disco and punk were polarising, dominating forces, Let There Be Rock sounded like the work of rock ’n’ roll primitives locked away in their own world. While each AC/DC album seemed to ramp up the intensity and menace, this 1977 effort seemed almost brutal in its attack. Riffs were faster and laced with fuzz on the “Route 66”-esque “Bad Boy Boogie” and the salacious “Whole Lotta Rosie”. While Angus Young’s fretwork has never lacked energy, on the title track he practically sounds possessed. The band sound pared-down and ferocious on Let There Be Rock.
- For anyone who’s ever felt downtrodden, AC/DC provided Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. This 1976 album is a defiant one that kicks off with the ultimate teenage revenge fantasy—set to a dirty riff. From there on, it’s a wild night out with the boys from Down Under. Amidst all the clutter of boisterous FM radio in the late ’70s, AC/DC struck on something that was ferocious and pure, even in its puerility. The band could go from leering, locker room jokers to maniacal rock ’n’ rollers within the breadth of a song. This mixture, so evident on tracks like “Problem Child” to the ’50s rave-up of “There’s Gonna Be Some Rockin’” made AC/DC seem like a band you were never sure you wanted to party with or fear.
- Years of musical knowledge and understanding had passed between Angus and Malcolm Young by the time High Voltage announced the arrival of a new Australian take on rock. The brothers’ hours of performing and working together and obsessing over Chuck Berry and early heavy rock ’n’ roll insured that the songs on this album would be locked down and road-tested. With Bon Scott on board, this 1976 American release (technically a compilation of two Australian albums) reduced rock ’n’ roll down to rhythm, riffs and raunch. Scott sounds positively feral on “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer” while “T.N.T.” and “Live Wire” laid down the template for the band’s future: primal, monstrous riffs and sneering lyrics riddled with innuendo.
- 2014
- 1995
- 2021
- 2021
Artist Playlists
- The ultimate rock songs from the ultimate rock ’n’ roll band.
- AC/DC never needed fancy videos to gloss up their no-frills riffs.
- Old-school R&B and rockabilly found its way into their hard rock sound.
- Bluesy hard rockers and swaggering punk-metal icons.
- Their DNA is a punchy riff-fest of blues, glam and rock 'n' roll.
Singles & EPs
Compilations
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More To See
- 41:04
About AC/DC
In a conversation with Apple Music in 2020, Angus Young, the guitarist and principal songwriter in AC/DC, mused on what he thought made the band tick. After all, by that point, they’d been around for more than 45 years, and had spent those years making more or less the same song. Where other 1970s hard rock bands digressed into concept albums and orchestral suites in tortured efforts to prove how smart they were, AC/DC treated their records the way a cobbler might treat a shoe, or a watchmaker a watch: as a humble craft to be refined through repetition, and always geared towards the utility of the final product. Young said that his older brother George, who had produced their first several albums, stressed the importance of making your point clear and never doing more than you need to. Anyone could be complex—just put more junk into the pot. “The real art,” Young said, “is making the complex simple.” Formed in Sydney, Australia, in 1973, the band presented a rebuttal to the bloat of art and progressive rock, but also restored the music to its roots in Little Richard, blues and a kind of pre-Beatles notion that that rock music was primarily meant to entertain. Albums such as 1979’s Highway to Hell and 1980’s Back in Black may have helped create heavy metal, but they also shared the minimalist attitude of punk: The songs were short, the chords simple, the spirit clear and uncompromising. They survived not only the death of their first real singer (Bon Scott) and, later, of Angus’ brother, co-founder and co-writer Malcolm, but the hearing damage of Scott’s replacement, Brian Johnson. “You can’t call an album Rock or Bust and then go bust,” Young joked about the band’s 2020 record. And so they remained: proud, primitive, electric.
- ORIGIN
- Sydney, Australia
- FORMED
- 31 December 1973
- GENRE
- Hard Rock