Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits

Swordfishtrombones, Tom Waits' eighth studio album, came out on Island Records in 1983, and it blew up everything he'd been before. After marrying Kathleen Brennan, cutting loose from his old manager and label and moving to New York, Waits produced a record on his own for the first time and threw away the piano-based balladry for clanking, oddball instrumentation and songs that lurch, stagger and wheeze.

You can hear the pull of Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart in the junkyard rhythms, and Brennan's encouragement all over the leap. The gravel-throated voice is the same, still hanging out with society's underbelly, but the settings are stranger and more abstract. It only reached number 167 on the Billboard charts, yet it opened a loose trilogy with Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years, and "Frank's Wild Years" is the track that reached the countdowns.

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