I feel like the perfect album can exist for anyone. Sometimes an album hits just right at a specific time in your life. It becomes the background soundtrack for your day to day life. For me, it is The Postal Service's Give Up. There are so many reasons I love that album and to me there are no throwaway songs. It feels altogether ephemeral for me.

So yeah, it's highly subjective, but I think it's possible for all of us to experience music on this level. I hope you one day experience it, OP.

No, but there can be perfect albums for an individual.

For me, there's a decent number. I tend to have broad taste in music, so I have the advantage of genre access in this kind of thing.

Master of Puppets, Metallica, was the first perfect album I ran across. Not a single track I wanted to skip, and it's still pretty much impossible for me to make a playlist that includes Metallica that doesn't have the entire album on it. For years, I would play it to go to sleep to, my tape deck could auto flip, so I would just dub a few from the vinyl (showing my age here lol) and use them for that.

Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time is another.

Adele, 21 is brilliant from front to back.

Tracy Chapman, New Beginning is a fucking masterpiece.

Springsteen's Born in the USA is perfect.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the album by that name is a great one.

Depeche Mode, Violator. There's not a stinker on it.

Guns & Roses, Appetite for Destruction was and is a perfect album for sure.

John Lennon did it with Imagine, though barely; there are a couple of tracks that aren't as good as the rest, but they're still amazing overall.

Linkin Park could have two; One More Light is definitely perfect in my ears, and hybrid theory is right there with it, though I don't mind skipping a couple of tracks off of HT sometimes.

Nappy Roots managed a perfect hip-hop album (which isn't actually easy with me) in Watermelon, Chicken and Grits. Sublimely perfect southern rap. Every track a winner.

Biggie did Ready to Die, and I'd argue it's the second best hip-hop album of all time.

The greatest is Run-DMC with Raising Hell. How can you top that album as a whole? Every track a banger, every rhyme a killer.

The list could go on. Obviously, I tend to lean into rock, metal, and hip-hop as my most listened genres, but there's at least one album for me in almost any genre. I'm sure if I delved deeper in some, I would find more.

Plenty. There are literally hundreds of albums in my collection that I'd consider "perfect," the first one I ever realized as one was Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the most recent probably being Hellfire by Black Midi. What type of music do you listen to? I can try to give some more relevant suggestions for you based on that.

I was wondering the same thing and then I found Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon.

So the answer is yes, my perfect album exists.

And then I found Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here, and I realized two perfect albums exist for me, so far

Queen - A kind of Magic

Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill

Surprised nobody mentioned Rumors by Fleetwood Mac.

Paul Simon - Graceland is utterly unique and every track is a masterpiece

The same can be said for Pink Floyd - The Wall

Perfect is in the eyes (or ears, in this case) of the beholder. A song can sound like the best thing you've ever heard, and you could make an entire album out of it, but the pursuit of perfection is futile.

Ask any artist if they've ever released a perfect album, there will not be a "yes". Every artist is keenly aware of their own faults/shortcomings and end up thinking about what tracks they would have done better. You could have someone make music for a thousand years and they'd still think of something else they could have done the next day. And even then, what sounds better to an artist may not sound better to their listeners, so perfection is simply not worth wasting brain space over.

As other have said, it's subjective, but here are some albums I'd consider perfect:

• R.E.M. - Murmur, Reckoning, Lifes Rich Pageant, Automatic for the Prople
• Orbital - In Sides
• Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
• Leftfield - Leftism
• Beatles - Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper
• Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
• Underworld - Second Toughest in the Infants
• Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
• Massive Attack - Blue Lines
• John Coltrane - Blue Train
• Velvet Underground - Velvet Underground and Nico
• Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
• Nas - Illmatic
• Portishead - Dummy, Portishead
• Chemical Brothers - Exit Planet Dusr
• Tricky - Maxinquaye
• Jim White - The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jeaus

Pink Floyd: the dark side of the moon

F♯ A♯ ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Eve 6 's debut album.

Jesus Nightlight is the only speedbump, but that's mostly due to placement. If it was the closing track, it would have been a totally different experience.

Disregarding that one song being in an inopportune position, it's the only perfect album I know of.

In Extremo - Raue Spree (live)

Name the genre and I’ll give you one.

Edit: not like make the album, I’ll just tell you about one

• Dave Brubeck - Time Out
• Miles Davis - Birth of the cool, Kind of blue

I don't think anyone's going to disagree with this

Let It Be by The Replacements

Perfect albums that come to mind :

Pink Floyd - Animals

Depeche Mode - Violator

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

Dire Straits - Dire Straits

Curtis Mayfield - Superfly

Daft Punk - Discovery

Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Sseventh Son

Death - Symbolic

Rush - Moving Pictures

Tool – 10,000 Days

Stoner witch by the Melvins

The first three Sabbath records

The first three Ramones records

The first three Clash records

The first three Metallica records

Beastie boys - Paul's Boutique Blackalicious - Blazing Arrow Against Me! - Reinventing Axle Rose Justice - Justice The Rapture - Pieces of the people we love

Deloused in the comatorium

French album for those who speak French : Les Étoiles Vagabondes - Nekfeu

Makes me go through all emotions, excellent writer. It is just the best album to me.