Listen to the 64 Grammy winners for album of the year, and they’ll tell the story of the last six decades of popular music. Except, well, not really, at all. Zoom out on all 64 and squint a little and you might be able to see a general progression from jazz and vocal standards to rock to pop and hip-hop, but the timeline traced by the album of the year winners is really more of a Jeremy Bearimy: constantly curving, skipping around and looping back unpredictably.
That’s part of the fun of the Grammys canon, though: The tale it tells isn’t always the most coherent, but it’s rich with moment-in-time pretzel logic that makes sense when viewed in totality — not to mention fascinating quirks forgotten in most enduring pop narratives of the past. And every so often, the Recording Academy gets it totally right, rewarding an album so undeniably essential that all voting roads lead back to it as the one and only answer. (And then the next year it might very well revert to an entirely WTF selection.)
So before we crown a victor for 2023, let’s look back at the 64 albums that brought home the biggest honor from Music’s Biggest Night so far — hits, misses, and all the many negotiations in between — to see how they stack up against one another. You might need a seatbelt to guard against the sheer whiplash caused by careening through some of these wildly disparate albums, but viewed all together they provide a pretty good representation of the wild ride that the Grammys have taken us on since 1959.