1989 by Taylor Swift

1989, Taylor Swift's fifth album, came out on Big Machine on October 27, 2014, named for the year she was born and pitched as a clean-slate rebirth. This is where she shut the door on country and walked into full-on pop, producing it with Max Martin, Shellback, Jack Antonoff, Ryan Tedder, Nathan Chapman and Imogen Heap.

The acoustic guitars are gone, swapped for thick banks of synths, drum machines and processed backing vocals with a big '80s gleam. The songs trace the fallout of a relationship gone wrong, through heartbreak and recovery to self-discovery, sometimes breezy, sometimes wistful. "Shake It Off", "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood" all went to number one on the Hot 100. A few critics grumbled that all the gloss buried the songwriter; the Grammy voters disagreed, handing it Album of the Year in 2016, and in 2026 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

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