The sheer scale of Michael Jackson’s fame can sometimes overshadow the music itself. From the moment he danced into America’s hearts as the 11-year-old lead singer of the Jackson 5 on their chart-topping 1969 debut single “I Want You Back,” Jackson has been a star. Over the course of the ’70s, the Jackson 5, later renamed the Jacksons, remained a fixture on Billboard, with Michael occasionally releasing solo albums. He entered a new stratosphere of fame, however, with the release of 1982’s Thriller, which remains by most metrics the highest-selling album of all time.
Jackson’s distinctive dance moves, masterful showmanship, and innovative music videos and short films made him an icon, and one of the biggest names in pop music right up until his tragic death in 2009. It’s Jackson’s music, and his gifts as a singer, songwriter, and producer, however, that mean more than all the iconography and tabloid controversy. Over the course of his career, Jackson made dozens of albums, and it’s a fascinating body of work well beyond the handful of solo albums he made as an A-list star.
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The album that minted Michael Jackson as a major solo star, 1979’s Off the Wall, will be reissued in the Hybrid SACD format on Friday, January 17. Here’s a look back at all of Jackson’s studio albums, both as a solo artist and with his brothers.
28. Michael (2010)
The first posthumous Jackson album was released a year after his death, and became tainted by controversy when fans and Jackson family members alleged that some of the songs on the release did not actually feature his vocals. After a decade of allegations that a soundalike vocalist, Jason Malachi, sang three songs on Michael, those tracks were removed from the album in 2022. The remaining seven undisputed songs, including forgettable Akon and Lenny Kravitz collaborations, make for a slight and inessential collection. “(I Like) The Way You Love Me,” which opens with a phone voicemail of Jackson singing and beatboxing his initial idea for the song to a collaborator, is one of the few moments of magic on the album.
27. Skywriter with the Jackson 5 (1973)
By the time the Jackson 5’s seventh album was released, Michael and Jermaine Jackson both had Top Ten solo hits, but the group itself wasn’t faring as well on the charts. Skywriter reflects the transitional period when the Motown song factory wasn’t a sure thing anymore, but disco hadn’t yet revitalized the Jacksons’ fortunes. It’s also outright awkward when a 14-year-old Michael Jackson sings on the sensual and suggestive Supremes cover “Touch.” “What used to pass for a youthful quintet self-consciously flaunting their relatively minimal chronological standing now sounds more and more like the ageless joy of gospel,” Mark Vining wrote in the Rolling Stone review of Skywriter.
26. Xscape (2014)
The second posthumous Michael Jackson album was a substantial improvement over 2010’s Michael. The album featured eight unreleased songs Jackson had worked on in the ’80s and ’90s, polished up and finished by contemporary hitmakers like Timbaland and Stargate. “Love Never Felt So Good,” written by Jackson and Paul Anka in 1980, and outfitted with a bouncy Timbaland beat and additional vocals by Justin Timberlake, is the only fully irresistible track on Xscape. The rest of the album is merely pleasant, with a weak riff on America’s “Horse with No Name” called “A Place with No Name” as its only serious misstep.
25. Lookin’ Through the Windows with the Jackson 5 (1972)
Amidst the Jackson 5’s fading commercial fortunes in America, Lookin’ Through the Windows broke out and became the group’s most popular album in the U.K. That’s largely due to a turn towards a more pop/rock sound, including a hit cover of Jackson Browne’s “Doctor, My Eyes” that gave an early indication of Michael Jackson’s versatility and ease with more worldly and sophisticated material.
24. Ben (1972)
1971’s Willard and 1972’s Ben, a pair of horror films about a colony of intelligent killer rats, made for an unusual launching pad for Michael Jackson’s first No. 1 solo single, the Oscar-winning “Ben.” Despite Jackson’s moving vocal performance, it’s a strange song to build an album around, especially a fairly bland collection that features a sleepy cover of the Temptations’ “My Girl.” The cloying glee club harmonies on songs like “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” are a constant reminder that Michael always sounded better singing with his brothers.
23. Moving Violation with the Jackson 5 (1975)
Moving Violation was the tenth and final album released under the Jackson 5 name before the group left Motown, unhappy with the extremely low royalty rate they earned from the label and a lack of creative control. Motown songwriting legends Brian and Eddie Holland worked on a handful of new songs on Moving Violation, including the quiet storm classic “All I Do Is Think of You,” but the rest of the album suffers from weak, generic disco songwriting.
22. Invincible (2001)
Invincible reportedly cost $30 million to record, which means it’s probably the most expensive album ever made. A team of super producers led by Rodney Jerkins struggled mightily with Jackson’s reduced vocal range and tabloid-battered public image to try to make a Y2K blockbuster, and disciples like Usher and Justin Timberlake spent the next few years more successfully modernizing the MJ sound. The lilting and beautiful “Butterflies” stands out as perhaps Jackson’s last great song, but Invincible is largely an uninspired monument to music industry excess and celebrity hubris.
21. Forever, Michael (1975)
Michael Jackson’s last solo album for Motown, released a few months before Moving Violation, was the lowest-charting album of his career, peaking at No. 101 on the Billboard 200. Forever, Michael has some funky, feisty music, but it’s ultimately overpowered by schmaltz. One of the schmaltziest ballads, “One Day In Your Life,” eventually became a major hit, though, with a 1981 re-released topping the U.K. singles chart following the success of Off the Wall.
20. The Jacksons with the Jacksons (1976)
Since Motown owned the Jackson 5 name, the group was rechristened the Jacksons for their first album on Epic. Jermaine Jackson, married to Berry Gordy’s daughter Hazel, stayed with Motown as a solo artist, and little brother Randy Jackson took his place in the group. The Jacksons’ self-titled album was produced by Philadelphia International hitmakers Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, giving the brothers’ sound a grown up makeover. “Blues Away,” the first official songwriting credit by Michael Jackson, is silky and sublime, but most of The Jacksons finds the brothers simply trying on the aesthetic that had been perfected by the O’Jays and the Blue Notes.
19. Music & Me (1973)
At a time when the Jackson 5’s music was moving in a modern direction, Michael Jackson’s third album was a little stuck in the past, featuring a ’30s musical number, “All the Things You Are,” and a ’50s Nat King Cole hit, “Too Young.” Music & Me has some great contemporary material like “Euphoria,” written by Motown journeyman Leon Ware, but there’s not enough of it.
18. Victory with the Jacksons (1984)
Michael Jackson never mounted a solo tour in support of Thriller, instead reuniting with his brothers (including Jermaine for the first time in nine years) for an album and a massive tour. Michael is less of a dominant presence on Victory than on previous Jacksons albums, only singing lead on three tracks. It very much feels like a half-hearted sequel to Thriller, though, full of strident pop/rock tracks recorded with members of Toto. The album audibly buckles under the weight of its commercial expectations, even on its catchiest singles, “Torture” and the Mick Jagger collaboration “State of Shock.” The Jacksons recorded one more album, 1989’s 2300 Jackson Street, although Michael was no longer a member of the group and only appeared on one song. “Ten studios were used for recording and not surprisingly the final vinyl lacks cohesion or bite. I’d save my pennies for Michael’s next solo outing,” Paul Bursche wrote in the No. 1 review of Victory.
17. Maybe Tomorrow with the Jackson 5 (1971)
The Jackson 5’s fifth album is best remembered for ballads like “Never Can Say Goodbye,” but the brothers still summon the youthful exhilaration of their early hits on “My Little Baby” and a cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Honey Chile.” Maybe Tomorrow became a favorite of crate-digging hip-hop producers in the ’90s, when the title track was sampled on Ghostface Killah’s “All That I Got Is You” and “It’s Great To Be Here” was sampled on Puff Daddy’s “It’s All About the Benjamins (Remix).”
16. Goin’ Places with the Jacksons (1977)
The second Jacksons album on Epic, once again produced by Gamble & Huff, wasn’t a big commercial success, but the group got deeper into their Philly soul groove with sumptuous ballads like “Heaven Knows I Love You, Girl.” The Jackson brothers wrote two songs on the album, including the talkbox-heavy disco jam “Different Kind of Lady,” which would embolden the group to write more and more on subsequent albums.
15. Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 with the Jackson 5 (1969)
Supremes star Diana Ross was an enormous influence on Michael Jackson and they’d later co-star in The Wiz. The title and liner notes of the Jackson 5’s debut album that indicated that Ross discovered the group, however, were just marketing hype that Motown concocted after signing and recording the family band. The album’s only single, “I Want You Back,” remains a bright ray of sunshine, and the brothers give spirited performances of hits by Motown labelmates like Stevie Wonder and the Four Tops, but it’s a fairly filler-heavy album.
14. G.I.T.: Get It Together with the Jackson 5 (1973)
The lowest-charting Jackson 5 album is far more enjoyable than it usually gets credit for, including a loose and funky 8-minute cover of the Temptations’ “Hum Along and Dance” that was sampled on the Public Enemy classic “Prophets of Rage.” “It’s Too Late To Change the Time” featured the first on-record appearance of Michael’s famous ‘hiccup,’ as his increasingly distinctive vocal style started to come into focus.
13. Dancing Machine with the Jackson 5 (1974)
The song “Dancing Machine” probably could’ve disappeared into obscurity after debuting as the closing track on the underperforming G.I.T. Instead, a single edit was released in 1974 that became the group’s biggest hit in three years, and the title track of a new album that doubled down on its infectious energy. Michael Jackson singled out two great deep cuts, “What You Don’t Know” and “If I Don’t Love You This Way,” as his favorite songs on Dancing Machine when the group appeared on Soul Train.
12. Third Album with the Jackson 5 (1970)
Of all the songs that Berry Gordy’s songwriting team the Corporation penned for the Jackson 5, “Goin’ Back to Indiana” stands out as the only one with lyrics crafted specifically to tell the group’s story, saluting the Jackson family’s home state. Third Album featured the group’s fourth consecutive No. 1 on the Hot 100, “I’ll Be There,” the song that fully revealed Michael Jackson as an expressive ballad singer in addition to his natural touch with uptempo material.
11. HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book 1 (1995)
By the mid-’90s, Michael Jackson’s little sister Janet Jackson was one of his biggest competitors on the pop charts, often making better music than him with her brilliant production team Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. On HIStory, a heavily hyped double album that packaged one disc of Jackson’s greatest hits with one disc of new songs, Michael and Janet united for the frenetic and inspired lead single “Scream,” one of four excellent songs produced by Jam and Lewis. The album is a mixed bag, though, veering between some of Michael Jackson’s blandest ballads and some of his most tortured cries for help. “They Don’t Care About Us,” initially mired in controversy over Jackson’s use of antisemitic slurs, has in recent years been sanitized and celebrated as a righteous social justice anthem, becoming the album’s top streaming song.
10. Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix (1997)
Blood on the Dance Floor featured five new songs and eight remixes of songs from HIStory. With the help of remixers like Todd Terry, Frankie Knuckles, and Wyclef Jean, the collection feels a little closer to what the album should’ve sounded like the first time around, connecting the King of Pop’s larger-than-life songs to more danceable beats from the worlds of house music and hip-hop. “‘Morphine’ is a dance step in the right direction—alternating Trent Reznor-style sturm und clang with Bacharachian orchestral pomp, the track drags Jackson’s sound out of the mid-’80s muck,” Tom Sinclair wrote in the Entertainment Weekly review of Blood on the Dance Floor.
9. Jackson 5 Christmas Album with the Jackson 5 (1970)
No other holiday album has ever given voice to a child’s joy on Christmas morning quite like Jackson 5 Christmas Album. “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” are essentials for any R&B Christmas playlist, 12-year-old Michael Jackson’s performances brimming over with holiday cheer. Even the album’s two original songs, “Give Love on Christmas Day” and “Christmas Won’t Be the Same This Year,” are charming minor works.
8. Triumph with the Jacksons (1980)
Released between Off the Wall and Thriller, Triumph finds Michael Jackson at the peak of his powers, writing the bulk of the album, often as a team with little brother Randy. “Heartbreak Hotel,” retitled “This Place Hotel” out of deference to the Elvis Presley classic, may be the single greatest Jacksons song, both spooky and soulful, and it remained a staple of Michael’s solo concerts for years.
7. Bad (1987)
Pop music in general got a lot more hi tech between 1982 and 1987. Michael Jackson’s music lost a lot of warmth and feeling in the jump from Thriller to Bad, however, and never really got it back. Bad is by no means emotionless—if anything, “Man in the Mirror” hits harder now, in light of how complicated and tragic Jackson’s life would become. The steely, syncopated synth funk of “Smooth Criminal” and “Speed Demon” has aged better than some of the album’s stilted state-of-the-art updates of more traditional R&B styles, though.
6. Destiny with the Jacksons (1978)
Destiny is the moment that the Jacksons fully took over in the studio, producing the album and writing all but one song. The exception, the hit “Blame it on the Boogie,” was written by the British brothers Mick Jackson and David Jackson (no relation). Destiny’s title track is a gorgeous midtempo epic, but most of the album is a restlessly kinetic disco workout with some of the group’s tightest vocal arrangements.
5. Got to Be There (1972)
Michael Jackson’s debut solo album had some Jackson 5 sweetness, particularly in the hit cover of Bobby Day’s “Rockin’ Robin.” Got to Be There also featured some of the finest and most sophisticated material that the Motown machine ever crafted for him, including the title track, “I Wanna Be Where You Are,” and southern soul cult hero Willie Hutch’s “Girl Don’t Take Your Love from Me.” Jackson would continue making music with his brothers for over a decade, but at just 13 years old he established that he could stand on his own as a star whenever he wanted to.
4. Dangerous (1991)
After moving on from his work with Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson spent much of his later albums seeking out younger R&B and pop hitmakers that he’d influenced, trying to stay current. No producer rose to the occasion quite as well as Teddy Riley, who’d played a major role in developing the new jack swing genre in the late ’80s and early ’90s. On Dangerous, Riley helps carve a sharper figure out of the bloat and bombast that defines all of Jackson’s post-Thriller albums, and Jackson’s increasingly percussive vocal style came alive in new ways over Riley’s propulsive new jack swing tracks.
3. ABC with the Jackson 5 (1970)
Decades before “boy bands” became a permanent and very lucrative sector of the music industry, the Jackson 5 made perhaps the greatest boy band album of all time. The Corporation’s bubblegum soul concoctions for the group’s second album, including the chart-topping singles “ABC” and “The Love You Save,” are perfect crystallizations of a formula that successors like New Edition and Hanson have returned to time after time. ABC also features a psychedelic curveball in the form of an excellent rendition of “I’ll Bet You,” one of George Clinton’s early songs for Funkadelic.
2. Thriller (1982)
Set aside the record-breaking sales, innovative videos, and enormous cultural impact of Thriller for a moment, if you can, and just marvel at the number of styles and genres that Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones tackled and made their own on the album. “Billie Jean,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” and the title track are dynamic, dramatic pop songs that are still deeply grounded in soul music. “Beat It” rocked hard enough to land on radio playlists between Def Leppard and ZZ Top, and even a fairly straightforward ballad like “Human Nature” has a cinematic sci-fi gleam to it. In their successful quest for world domination, Jackson and Jones only aimed one song, the dopey lead single “The Girl is Mine” featuring Paul McCartney, straight down the middle of the road, and it’s the main reason Thriller isn’t Jackson’s very best album. “It is another signpost on the road to Michael Jackson’s own artistic fulfillment,” John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times review of Thriller.
1. Off the Wall (1979)
Off the Wall was released one month after the infamous “disco demolition night” at a Chicago baseball game that sharpened the growing backlash against dance music’s late ’70s domination of the pop charts. Michael Jackson’s fifth solo album and first with veteran producer Quincy Jones, however, was just too good to be slowed down by the cultural headwinds, and became the first album by a solo artist to send four singles into the Top Ten of the Hot 100. Jones’s lush arrangements and Jackson’s infectious melodies are a lethal combination on deathless dancefloor fillers like “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Rock with You.” A young Jackson sang many Stevie Wonder songs when they were Motown labelmates, but Off the Wall’s gentle gem “I Can’t Help It” is the finest song Wonder penned specifically for Jackson, giving the album a softer side along with the tearful ballad “She’s Out of My Life.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.