Illmatic by Nas

Illmatic, the debut from Nas, hit the racks on Columbia on April 19, 1994, and it's about as lean and deadly as a rap record gets. MC Serch helped get the Queensbridge kid signed, and Nas cut the album across 1992 and 1993 at Chung King, D&D, Battery and Unique in New York, with a producer lineup that reads like a dream draft: DJ Premier, Large Professor, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, L.E.S. and Nas himself.

The beats are dusty and jazz-flecked, boom bap at its most hypnotic, but the star is the voice. Nas stacks rhymes inside rhymes and tells street stories drawn from growing up in the Queensbridge Houses, and he'd started writing them at just 16. Sales started slow, the critics went wild anyway, it finally went platinum in 2001, and the Library of Congress later added it to the National Recording Registry.

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