Every Velvet Underground album ranked from worst to best
From the cursed Squeeze to the uncompromising chaos of White Light / White Heat, we rank The Velvet Underground’s five studio albums from worst to best.
It would be no exaggeration to call The Velvet Underground the most influential band in music history. John Cale appears on the cover of and performs on one of the biggest and most divisive pop records of this year, more than sixty years after he co-founded the group. That his work is so revered by modern titans like Charli XCX whilst simultaneously having a seemingly endless ripple effect on underground guitar music speaks to the relentless ambition of it. Across four of their five studio albums, The Velvets pioneered an uneasy middle ground between avant-garde and rock music. Cutting through the myriad of paisley shirts and easy-listening pop-rock that surrounded them, they created something much darker and much more artistically compelling. More on that other record later. Here are our rankings…
5) Squeeze
Technically a Velvet Underground record but more accurately a Doug Yule solo work, I’m reluctant to even include Squeeze in this list. It is inoffensive, if you absolutely had to say something positive. Mostly inoffensive. In many ways, though, that is the one thing that a VU record should never be. This is “The Velvet Underground” devoid of Lou Reed’s poetry and Cale’s relentless experimentation. People rightly give Lulu, the ill-fated collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, a hard time, but I’d listen to that record a million times before I’d turn to this. The music itself is too meek to feel strongly about, but the fact that it was allowed to be called a VU record is infuriating. It also gave its name to one of the worst bands of the next generation. A truly cursed record. If you have never listened to Squeeze, keep it that way.
4) Loaded
A further step from the daring noise of their finest work, but still a very good rock record in its own right. Loaded saw the band feeling pressure from their label to write a hit, and although they didn’t do that in a strict charting sense, there are plenty of great songs on here. It has been written before that the trifecta of ‘Who Loves the Sun’, ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Rock & Roll’ is amongst the best three-song openings of any record and it’s hard to argue with that. By this point in the band’s much-mythologised story, things were starting to sour. This would become the last VU record with any of the band’s original members and that sense of unravelling, at least in hindsight, does permeate the record in some ways. There was a fair amount of bickering around the record. Lou Reed was reportedly unhappy with a number of production decisions as well as Doug Yule’s increased presence on the record; the original sleeve art featured a giant image of him playing piano and his name was listed before Reed’s on the credits. The Velvet Underground were at their best when they felt uncompromising and this record feels like a sequence of compromises.
3) The Velvet Underground
There is virtually nothing between the first and second spots in this list. There is, perhaps, a little more of a gap between second and third. The Velvet Underground’s self-titled third record was their first without founding member John Cale and his absence is felt. By now, the band’s ethos of fusing avant-garde and rock music was established enough to prevent the hit of losing Cale being too devastating, but the experimental heights reached on the previous records perhaps aren’t matched. Instead, though, the tender poetry of Lou Reed takes centre stage and gives us some of the most beautiful songs ever committed to tape. ‘Some Kinda Love’, ‘After Hours’ and ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ especially feel more like the kind of songs that Reed would write in his brilliant solo career than what VU songs had been prior. ‘What Goes On’ is a truly perfect pop song too. There is so much to love about this record, but it just slightly outlives the period in which The Velvet Underground were the most unique proposition in counterculture.
2) The Velvet Underground & Nico
That we’re not naming this one their best album is perhaps the biggest compliment that you could pay to The Velvet Underground, because it would be pretty much any other group’s magnum opus. There are moments on this record that make you think “oh, I didn’t know music was allowed to be like this” and there are moments that are so familiar and so brilliant. I have fond memories of listening to ‘Heroin’ for the first time in my teens, slackjawed on my bedroom floor and reevaluating everything I thought I understood about music. It almost goes without saying that the influence of this record is eternal. So much great music, spanning noise rock, drone, folk and pop, owes itself to The Velvet Underground & Nico.
1) White Light / White Heat
It is unfathomable that anybody would come out with a record quite like White Light / White Heat today, so you can only imagine how mind-blowing it would’ve been to hear this back in 1968. The scuzziest and most unhinged guitar record that had ever been made by this point, without any doubt. The Velvet Underground formed as an antidote to the Summer of Love bands and they were never a clearer antithesis than they are on this record. Heteronormative songwriting, conventional song structures and any production subtlety are all completely disregarded in the successful pursuit of one of the most relentlessly creative recordings of all time. The inimitable closer ‘Sister Ray’ accounts for just under half the LP’s runtime, whilst the title track opener is motorik and precise across its two minutes. The only formula employed by the band is a complete disregard of formulas.