“Wrapping blues tradition in boundary-breaking innovation”: Every Led Zeppelin album ranked from worst to best

“wrapping-blues-tradition-in-boundary-breaking-innovation”:-every-led-zeppelin-album-ranked-from-worst-to-best
Led Zeppelin studio portrait
(Image credit: Album / Alamy Stock Photo)

The Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary has been criticised by some for its swift, wait-a-sec-what-happened-next conclusion, but there’s good reason for that. Ending as Led Zeppelin II is released, the timeline spares the filmmakers the onerous task of having to address the band’s Hammer Of The Gods years and all that entails, allowing them to focus on the music, which, as anyone who’s seen the film on a big screen can attest, sounds like it was beamed down from Olympus. And that’s why we’re here.

Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham formed Led Zeppelin in 1968, taking their name from a prediction from Keith Moon that their band was almost certain to go down like a ‘lead balloon’. Their manager Peter Grant’s lack of confidence in the record-buying public’s pronunciation skills, allied to an innate instinct to think big, translated The Loon’s withering sarcasm into ‘Led Zeppelin’. And before you could say ‘swiftly signed to Atlantic, relentlessly toured’, they were the World’s Biggest Band that, for some reason, nobody you knew had ever seen on television.

Inexplicable anonymity aside, Zeppelin’s vastness was preposterous, and as their fame ballooned, their artistic vision expanded to match. Ever more epic live shows were marked by extensive improvisations by four virtuosi whose inspired ensemble interplay seemed almost supernatural in origin. Audiences broke records, albums camped out at the top of charts and during their 12-year existence, Led Zeppelin casually conquered Earth.

You’ve clearly got all of the Led Zeppelin albums already, so here’s the order in which they appear if you rank them from least-best to most-best.

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Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records.

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