Defining Albums of Freshman Year

Alrighty kiddos, so my colleague Carter and I had been kicking around this idea of writing about the albums that defined our freshman years of college. Well, I liked the idea so I am going to be stealing it. Freshman year was an interesting time for me, and I feel like I created some pretty strong associations with the albums I was listening to. Freshman year my music taste evolved a lot, probably more than any other time. For the first time, indie rock started to replace punk as my “bread and butter” music genre. I also got into some classics like The Idiot, Daydream Nation, and Remain in Light, but those albums didn’t really create a strong connection to anything for me. Sorry Carter, but Sound of Silver didn’t make the cut for me either. “Someone Great” is still an incredible song, though.

Freshman Year Albums, A Retrospective

This is an article on the albums that were the most dear to me my first year of college. They aren't necessarily the best records I heard (though they're certainly among them), but rather those defined freshman year for me. They are roughly in chronological order of when their influence was most pronounced. Collectively they tell the story of my year pretty well. The lyrics are also YouTube links if you're into that.

Honorable mentions

A Journey Through Punk Rock

As an angsty teenager, I spent much of my time listening to music. And of course, most of that music was punk rock. I've somewhat gravitated more towards the indie rock and hip-hop genres in recent years, but punk was my first love, and probably the genre of which I have the most knowledge. So, I felt inspired to make a guide to essential punk, for my friends or whoever reads this blog (so for my friends) (have I made that joke on here already?). Anyway, here are what I consider to be the 100 essential punk rock albums. There may be some that you wish were on here, and my response to that is that I either don't like the album or haven't heard it; my knowledge is not exhaustive. And some of these may not be 100% pure punk but they're close enough and plenty essential to get a taste of the spectrum of the genre. It was hard to make a cutoff of what would and wouldn't be considered punk. I didn't want to make the guide too narrow, just a list of typical 3-chord late 70s stuff. I did my best to maximize both breadth and depth in this. Anyway, I'll break it down for you into sections so it won't be too intimidating. The sections may have some overlap, and they aren't perfect, but I tried to divide it up in a way that made sense and didn't make any one section too long.