Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication

By the time I was 10 I could probably recite every lyric from this album. It’s one of the first albums that convinced me that just listening to Greatest Hits albums, which I’ll admit was my main strategy at that age in order to maximize how much music I could get for my allowance, wasn’t actually the best use of my listening time. And fine, not every song here is a banger, but the first 11 inarguably are, and that’s an absolutely massive number of classics for one album. This was RHCP’s peak, in my mind, when their oddball fusion and weird high-guy philosophizing mixed with John Frusciante’s chops to make this a consummate 90’s kid rite-of-passage album.

From the roundup (Some of) The Greatest Albums of 1999.