Endtroducing..... by DJ Shadow

Endtroducing....., DJ Shadow's debut album, came out on Mo' Wax on September 16, 1996, and it's hip-hop with no rapper and no band, just crates. Joshua Davis built it over two years almost entirely out of samples lifted from vinyl records, working on an Akai MPC60 MKII sampler and not much else, stacking and slicing fragments until they became brand-new tracks.

The moods swing wide, from the ghostly drift of "Midnight in a Perfect World" to the slow-rising "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt", and it plays like a long, haunted walk through someone else's record collection. Britain got it first, sending it into the top 20 and on to gold; America caught up slowly, the press buzz growing while Shadow was back home in Davis, California, making new music. It now stands as a landmark of instrumental hip-hop and one of the great records of the '90s.

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