Released: 5 January 1973
Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone: 'Old Bruce makes a point of letting us know that he's from one of the scuzziest, most useless and plain uninteresting sections of Jersey. He's been influenced a lot by the Band, his arrangements tend to take on a Van Morrison tinge every now and then, and he sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck. It's a tuff combination, but it's only the beginning.
Because what makes Bruce totally unique and cosmically surfeiting is his words. Hot damn, what a passel o' verbiage! He's got more of them crammed into this album than any other record released this year, but it's all right because they all fit snug.' Photograph: PR
Released: 11 September 1973
Ken Emerson, Rolling Stone: 'Springsteen is growing as a writer of music as well as of words. The best of his new songs dart and swoop from tempo to tempo and from genre to genre, from hell-bent-for-leather rock to luscious schmaltz to what is almost recitative. There is an occasional weak spot or an awkward transition, but for the most part it works spectacularly, and nowhere to more dramatic effect than on Incident on 57th Street, the album's most stunning track, a virtual mini-opera about Johnny, a "romantic young boy" torn between Jane and the bright knives out on the street. Springsteen never resolves the conflict (if he ever does his music will probably become less interesting). Instead he milks it for all it's worth, wrapping up all the song's movements and juxtapositions with his unabashedly melodramatic and loonily sotted Sloppy Joe voice.' Photograph: PR
Released: 25 August 1975
Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone: 'It is a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him – a '57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records that shuts down every claim that has been made. And it should crack his future wide open. The song titles by themselves – Thunder Road, Night, Backstreets, Born to Run, Jungleland – suggest the extraordinary dramatic authority that is at the heart of Springsteen's new music. It is the drama that counts; the stories Springsteen is telling are nothing new, though no one has ever told them better or made them matter more. Their familiar romance is half their power: The promise and the threat of the night; the lure of the road; the quest for a chance worth taking and the lust to pay its price; girls glimpsed once at 80 miles an hour and never forgotten; the city streets as the last, permanent American frontier.' Photograph: PR
Released: 2 June 1978
Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone: 'Occasionally, a record appears that changes fundamentally the way we hear rock'n'roll, the way it's recorded, the way it's played. Such records – Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced, Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Who's Next, the Band – force response, both from the musical community and the audience. To me, these are the records justifiably called classics, and I have no doubt that Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town will someday fit as naturally within that list as the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction or Sly and the Family Stone's Dance to the Music.' Photograph: PR
Released: 10 October 1980
Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone: 'Scope, context, sequencing and mood are everything here. Bruce Springsteen didn't title his summational record The River for nothing, so getting hit with a quick sprinkle of lyrics is no solution when complete immersion is called for. Each song is just a drop in the bucket, and the water in the bucket is drawn from a river that can take you on a fast but invigorating ride (Sherry Darling, Out in the Street, Crush on You, I'm a Rocker), smash you in the rapids (Hungry Heart), let you float dreamily downstream (I Wanna Marry You) or carry you relentlessly across some unknown county line (Jackson Cage, Point Blank, Fade Away, Stolen Car, Ramrod, The River, Independence Day). When the surface looks smooth, watch out for dangerous undercurrents.' Photograph: PR
Released: 20 September 1982
Steve Pond, Rolling Stone: 'After 10 years of forging his own brand of fiery, expansive rock'n'roll, Bruce Springsteen has decided that some stories are best told by one man, one guitar. Flying in the face of a sagging record industry with an intensely personal project that could easily alienate radio, rock's gutsiest mainstream performer has dramatically reclaimed his right to make the records he wants to make, and damn the consequences. This is the bravest of Springsteen's six records; it's also his most startling, direct and chilling. And if it's a risky move commercially, Nebraska is also a tactical masterstroke, an inspired way out of the high-stakes rock'n'roll game that requires each new record to be bigger and grander than the last.' Photograph: PR
Released: 4 June 1984
Debby Miller, Rolling Stone: 'Though it looks at hard times, at little people in little towns choosing between going away and getting left behind, Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen's seventh album, has a rowdy, indomitable spirit. Two guys pull into a hick town begging for work in Darlington County, but Springsteen is whooping with sha-la-las in the chorus. He may shove his broody characters out the door and send them cruising down the turnpike, but he gives them music they can pound on the dashboard to.' Photograph: PR
Released: 9 October 1987
Steve Pond, Rolling Stone: 'So Bruce Springsteen met a girl, fell in love, got married and made an album of songs about meeting a girl, falling in love and getting married. And if you think it's that cut and dried, you don't know Springsteen. Far from being a series of hymns to cozy domesticity, Tunnel of Love is an unsettled and unsettling collection of hard looks at the perils of commitment. A decade or so ago, Springsteen acquired a reputation for romanticizing his subject matter; on this album he doesn't even romanticize romance. Tunnel of Love is precisely the right move for an artist whose enormous success gloriously affirmed the potential of arena rock'n'roll but exacted a toll on the singer.' Photograph: PR
Released: 31 March 1992
Anthony Decurtis, Rolling Stone: 'The album's 10 songs paint a convincing – and only rarely cloying – portrait of domestic life and its contents. The rousing opener, Better Days, ably sets the tone; it's a bracing anti-nostalgia blast that asserts: "These are better days baby/Better days with a girl like you." The song also takes on with impressive candor the Springsteen myth ("It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending/A rich man in a poor man's shirt") and the immeasurable degree of his material comfort ("A life of leisure and a pirate's treasure/Don't make much for tragedy").' Photograph: PR
Released: 31 March 1992
Anthony Decurtis, Rolling Stone: 'Beginning with the pulsing title track, which stands among Springsteen's best work, the 14 songs on Human Touch explore the movement from disenchanted isolation to a willingness to risk love and its attendant traumas again. At first the moves are tentative, motivated more by loneliness – a need for "a little of that human touch" – than by love's golden promise or, even more remote, the prospect of actual lasting happiness with another human being. Also, as the bluesy Cross My Heart makes clear, the certainties of the past ("Once you cross your heart/You ain't ever supposed to lie") are starting to be replaced by a more shaded outlook: "Well you may think the world's black and white/And you're dirty or you're clean/You better watch out you don't slip/Through them spaces in between".' Photograph: PR
Released: 21 November 1995
Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone: 'Bruce Springsteen's best music has always been about the refusal to accept life's meanest fates or most painful limitations. For more than 20 years now, Springsteen's music has worked as a cry of courage, an emboldening reassurance that life, no matter how closefisted it many seem, is worth keeping faith in. The Ghost of Tom Joad tells a different story – or at least it looks at the story through different eyes. It's a record about people who do not abide by life's ruins; it's a collection of dark tales about dark men who are cut off from the purposes of their own hearts and the prospects of their own lives. On this album almost none of the characters get out with both their bodies and spirits intact, and the few who do are usually left with only frightful desolate prayers as their solace.' Photograph: PR
Released: 30 July 2002
Alexis Petridis, the Guardian: 'The Rising is heavy-handed. Its lyrics are repetitious, its sound wilfully dated, its messages straightforward. But perhaps heavy-handedness is the point. The last time Springsteen made headlines, in 2000, the head of New York's Fraternal Order of Police was calling him a "fucking dirtbag" for writing American Skin, an oblique song about the police shooting of West African immigrant Amadou Diallo. There is no room for interpretation here, which makes it a perfect record for an America where ambiguity's stock has crashed. They may even start calling him The Boss again.' Photograph: PR
Released: 26 April 2005
Euan Ferguson, the Observer: 'It is in the end an ambitious, personal, successful piece of work. Working mainly with fiddles and steel guitar, shorn of the E-Street Band and thus able to let his voice find nuances otherwise denied it, Springsteen crafts his responses to war, sex, mothers, Christ and guilt with affection and belief. If there's any problem with Devils & Dust it's that of the tracklisting. Springsteen's albums always have a couple of, well, not necessarily duds, but indulgences, and the way this pans out there are about four of these in a row. There are times, on first listening, when it would help to be an absolute die-hard Springsteen fan or to be facing an extremely lengthy road-trip, quite possibly involving snakeskin boots and scrub pine and critters, to get the full benefit … and then, and then, you remember to listen to Springsteen's lyrics and you start packing for the trip.' Photograph: PR
Released: 25 April 2006
Mat Snow, the Guardian: 'Drawing as much from the spiritual tradition as Appalachian mountain music, We Shall Overcome (the title track of which Springsteen first cut for a 1997 Seeger tribute album) sounds like a classic of roots Americana to rank with anything by Dylan and the Band, Dr John or Leon Russell, while the match of Springsteen's huskiness and the hootenanny plangency of fiddle, banjo and accordion recalls the ancestral Irish folk-rock of such as Van Morrison and the Pogues.' Photograph: PR
Released: 2 October 2007
The Observer: 'Magic is the record that many Springsteen fans have been waiting for since 2002's The Rising, the last time Springsteen and his faithful E Streeters plugged in together. It will be his most adored since the Eighties, when this anti-war liberal was the guitar hero of all America. The 18-wheeler roll of these muscular pop songs, meanwhile, harks back to Springsteen's Seventies Jersey Shore sound.' Photograph: PR
Released: 27 January 2009
Richard Williams, the Guardian: 'Perhaps it's a relief that, despite the implications of its title, Working On a Dream is not a state of the nation address. At the dawn of the presidency of a man who recently said he had put himself up for the job only when he finally concluded that he could never be Bruce Springsteen, these 13 songs offer not even the most oblique of references to public affairs. The best of them concentrate on states of the heart, but with an openness and an optimism that seem unclouded by wider doubts and fears, as if in recognition of a need for consolation.' Photograph: PR
Released: 6 March 2012
Kitty Empire, the Observer: 'No one really comes to a Bruce Springsteen album looking for subtlety. But there have been few Springsteen albums that so resemble a sledgehammer holding a megaphone as Wrecking Ball, his 17th. More rousing than The Rising, more polemical than his album of Pete Seeger sessions, Wrecking Ball deploys biblical imagery, train metaphors, Irish rebel reels, mariachi horns and even the sax solos of the late Clarence Clemons on an album in which the bankers get it in the neck so hard, some wags have already subtitled it Occupy NJ. It's an election year, and the Boss is mobilising, employing mainstream producer Ron Aniello to make these big, unambiguous tunes punch hard on modern rock radio.' Photograph: PR
Release: 14 January 2014
Kitty Empire, the Observer: 'The overall impression is of a record playing with playfulness. Springsteen throws out curveballs, toys with gospel (Heaven's Wall) and Celtic forms (This Is Your Sword). The most audacious rethink by some measure, though, is the album's closing cover of Suicide's Dream Baby Dream, Springsteen and Co take the song's scrawny hopefulness and ratchet it up to hymnal E Street proportions – an act not unlike this record, which takes the idea of a stopgap album full of odds and ends and reimagines it as something much more satisfying.' Photograph: PR
