Neil Young’s best albums, ranked and reviewed! 1968-1975 | Albums 4-1 — State of Sound

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Neil Young’s greatest albums ranked and reviewed! 1968-1975 | Albums 4-1

From his pristine eponymous debut through to the first post-’ditch’ record, Zuma, 1968-1975 forms the first great era of Neil Young’s discography. Read the final part of our ranking, from No. 4-No. 1.

Photo: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Alamy

27 June 2026

Neil Young, Copenhagen, Denmark in 1976

After the Gold Rush

Neil Young

4.

Few remember much about the screenplay which first inspired After the Gold Rush. Prominent member of the 1970s Topanga Canyon scene, Shannon Forbes recalls the film’s apocalyptic ending, in which a tidal wave engulfs the main character standing in a parking lot. Whatever its details, the screenplay was enough to inspire Young, who embarked on the soundtrack before film production had begun. According to Young, only two tracks from the finished album — ‘After the Gold Rush’ and ‘Cripple Creek Ferry’ — ended up being linked to the screenplay.

Young biographer Jimmy McDonough points out After the Gold Rush included several breakthroughs: it was the first Neil Young album recorded outside of a large studio (it was made in the small basement of Young’s house), the first without overdubbed vocals and the first to feature a 17-year-old Nils Lofgren. Perhaps the Neil Young album with the most consistently strong collection of songs, the album eschews most of the hard rock of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in favour of quieter acoustic productions with folk, country and singer-songwriter flavours — a bridge to Harvest.

On the Beach

Neil Young

3.

The penultimate song on On the Beach, ‘Motion Pictures’ originated in part from an edible marijuana concoction dubbed ‘honey slides’. Made by stewing marijuana in honey, the dark unctuous results could leave you, according to Neil Young, ‘laid-back into the middle of next week’. Recorded whilst high on ‘honey slides’, Young described ‘Motion Pictures’ as like being ‘underwater without bubbles’. It's a turn of phrase which could describe the final five songs of the album, which sound as if they have emerged from a deep swamp of melancholy.

It is a slightly surprising emotional turn for an album which opens with gentle country rocker ‘Walk On’, followed by the sweet and hopeful ‘See the Sky About to Rain’: ‘Some are bound to glory / Some are bound to live with less / Who can tell your story?’ Things then turn bitter and vitriolic on ‘Revolution Blues’. Driven along by Rick Danko’s loping and ominous bassline, the song documents Young’s reflections on living in LA and meeting Charles Manson: ‘Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars’. But then as if the ‘honey slides’ kick in, things begin to congeal. The title track and ‘Ambulance Blues’ paint desolate emotional landscapes, plumbing depths few artists can reach.

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Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Neil Young with Crazy Horse

2.

Over the course of several days in the late summer of 1968, Neil Young sat in with the Rockets at Hollywood’s famous Whisky a Go Go. The resulting creative sparks sent his career and the history of alternative rock in a new direction. Pilfering the Rockets’ rhythm section — Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, and Ralph Molina — Young swiftly arranged a follow-up jam session in Topanga Canyon; a studio was then booked, and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was recorded in a handful of sessions between January and March 1969.

‘You always have to realise that you’re constantly in a state of becoming’, Bob Dylan said on No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, advice Young put into practice on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. ‘That whole album was like catching the group just as they were getting to know each other,’ he told Jean-Charles Costa, ‘… we didn’t even know what we sounded like until we heard the album.’

That coming-into-being feel, combined with the distorted guitars and unfiltered emotion, set the blueprint for grunge two decades later. The sound centres around Neil Young and Danny Whitten’s guitar interplay. 'Every musician has one guy on the planet that he can play with better than anyone else,’ Young said. ‘You only get one guy. My guy was Danny Whitten.’ Nowhere is their psychic connection more palpable than on the extended solos of 'Down by the River’ and ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’. Danny Whitten’s dampened strums intersect with Neil Young’s stabbing runs of single notes — technique thrown overboard in the search of feel.

Tonight’s the Night

Neil Young

1.

In an era of rapidly advancing studio technology, 1968-1975 saw Neil Young (after his carefully overdubbed solo debut) increasingly return to basics, pushing for an ever more ‘capture-the-moment’ live recording ethos. Like the beat-up guitars he loved so much, his patchwork clothes and his modest rustic ranch, there is a rough-and-ready, thrown-together feel to this album.

The recording sessions for Tonight’s the Night took place in a rehearsal hall, converted into a makeshift studio: a mobile recording lorry was parked in an alleyway, a hole sledgehammered through a wall and cables run into a small locker space which became the control room. ‘We’d get really high,’ Neil Young told Bud Scoppa in 1975, ‘drink a lot of tequila … We were wide open … just wide open ….’

Of the Ditch Trilogy, Tonight’s the Night is the most desolate and painful. Nowhere else in the 1968-1975 period does Young ache with such weary longing as on ‘Albuquerque’, or sound quite so broken as he does on ‘Borrowed Tune’. Whether the album is a pit of despair to step around, or a hand reaching up from the gloom, letting you know you are not alone, depends on your outlook. But no one can deny the sheer emotional force of an album which refuses to compromise its unvarnished darkness.