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16 years ago today, Katy Perry released ‘Firework.’

What are your thoughts about We Were Never the Same by Converge

Name an iconic Katy Perry song. I’ll start:

What are your thoughts about An Undying Love For A Burning Love by Neurosis?

Which Eminem album do you prefer?

The most acclaimed Japanese album of the 1990s is a 35-minute studio splice that accidentally served as its creator's eulogy. Earlier in 1996 Fishmans released a single called 'Season'. Shinji Sato then took its themes and stretched them into a single continuous 35 minute composition in five parts. He wanted at least 40 minutes, decided the extra length was too daunting, and settled for 35. In the studio the piece was spliced together from multiple takes, but on stage the band played it whole, altering it every night so it would never be performed the same way twice. In December 1998, Fishmans played a farewell concert for their departing bassist, Yuzuru Kashiwabara, and closed it with a 41 minute 'Long Season'. Three months later Sato was dead of heart failure at 33. The goodbye show had been his too, and nobody in the room knew it. A Tokyo dub band had built a symphony out of a single song, and their definitive performance of it was a farewell disguised as another one. linernotd.com/album/fishmans…

The defining experimental rap album of the 2010s effectively left its creator broke before it even came out. Danny Brown built Atrocity Exhibition over a jagged bed of obscure 1970s prog-rock and global psych samples sent to him by British producer Paul White. When Warp Records calculated the legal clearance fees for the massive web of uncleared audio, the $70,000 bill completely eclipsed the label's allotted recording budget. Rather than hire studio musicians to cheaply replay the melodies or scrap the tracks entirely, Brown paid the massive difference entirely out of pocket. A visionary hip-hop masterpiece was financed by a rapper voluntarily bankrupting himself to buy the rights to forty-year-old rock records. linernotd.com/album/danny-br…

The defining thrash metal record of the 1980s was produced by a hip-hop pioneer who simply stripped away all of the genre's standard studio effects. Rick Rubin applied the dry, punchy production style of his Def Jam rap releases to the sessions, completely removing the cavernous reverb that heavy metal bands relied on to sound massive. Stripped of that atmospheric padding, the band ripped through all ten tracks so fast that the entire record ended in just 28 minutes and 55 seconds, prompting bassist Tom Araya to legitimately ask if it even counted as a full-length release. The ultimate, intimidating benchmark for extreme metal aggression is practically a rap-produced EP. linernotd.com/album/slayer/r…

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The most chaotic, improvisational rock band of the 2000s recorded their masterpieces in complete, clinical isolation. After forming The Mars Volta in 2001, guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López instituted a dictatorial studio policy where no band member was allowed to hear the rest of the track while recording. He brought musicians in one by one, dictated their specific parts, and made them play to an isolated click track, actively hiding the context of the songs until the album was completely mastered. The band universally praised for their telepathic, sprawling chemistry was actually stitched together by a single guy operating a clinical assembly line. linernotd.com/artist/the-mar…

Progressive metal's most acclaimed concept album was written on the fly because the band arrived at the studio with zero rehearsed material. Mikael Åkerfeldt and Opeth booked Studio Fredman in Gothenburg for August 1999, but due to recent lineup shifts and a lack of practice space, they hadn't written a single finished song before stepping through the door. Åkerfeldt spent the first night in the studio frantically writing the entire lyrical storyline about an exiled religious outcast from scratch while engineer Fredrik Nordström slept on the couch. A sprawling, meticulously plotted literary tragedy was essentially written as a frantic, last-minute homework assignment. linernotd.com/album/opeth/st…

The artwork on the cover of Daydream Nation is worth over five hundred times what the album cost to make. Sonic Youth spent $30,000 recording their double-LP masterwork at Greene Street Recording in Manhattan, wrapping the gatefold sleeve in Gerhard Richter's 1983 candle painting Kerze. Richter granted them permission for free after Thurston Moore sent a personal letter, but the original canvas later sold at a Sotheby's auction for $16.6 million. A band famous for championing cheap, broken gear wrapped their defining masterpiece in sixteen million dollars of fine art. linernotd.com/album/sonic-yo…

The jazz-rap landmark that defined Brooklyn's underground scene in 1994 was engineered to destroy the band's own commercial momentum. Ishmael Butler, Marianne Vieira, and Craig Irving tracked Blowout Comb at D&D Studios and Pallette Sound in New York, deliberately throwing away the pop-jazz formula of their Grammy-winning debut single "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)." They ignored label demands for radio singles and spent their budget hiring live horn players and jazz bassists to jam over obscure vinyl loops, wrapping the physical LPs in a newspaper sleeve modeled after the Black Panther Party's official publication. The group earned an instant cult classic by actively sabotaging their own pop career. linernotd.com/album/digable-…

Every single song on Animal Collective's Feels was recorded in a key that exists in only one house in Maryland. The band built the foundation of the album around an old upright piano at a friend's home that had drifted microtonally out of tune over decades of neglect. When they entered Tarbox Road Studios with producer Scott Colburn, they hired a professional piano tuner not to fix their studio piano, but to painstakingly de-tune it until it perfectly matched a handheld MiniDisc recording of the out-of-tune instrument. I Indie rock's most celebrated love songs were played on a studio piano that a professional had to ruin on purpose. linernotd.com/album/animal-c…