Sea Change by Beck

Sea Change, Beck's eighth album, came out on Geffen on September 24, 2002, and it's the sound of a famous ironist setting down the sampler and telling it straight. Cut in Los Angeles over two months with Nigel Godrich producing, it trades the cut-and-paste collages of old for live instruments, and the cryptic wisecracks for plain, sincere lyrics about heartbreak, desolation and loneliness. The end of his relationship with his longtime girlfriend hangs over all of it.

"Lost Cause" is the heart of the thing, a weary, beautiful shrug of a song, and "The Golden Age" and "Guess I'm Doing Fine" drift under the same heavy skies. Critics bought the transformation completely, it reached number eight on the Billboard 200, and it keeps turning up on lists of the decade's best albums. Its companion piece, Morning Phase, followed in 2014.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.