Roots and Riddims: 10 Reggae Albums Worth Your Time

Released in October 1974 after the original Wailers had split, Natty Dread was the first album to feature the I Three backing vocalists and the record that established Marley's international profile. "No Woman, No Cry," "Them Belly Full," and "Rebel Music" showed a songwriter at the peak of his political consciousness and melodic gift.

Released in April 1976 and the first Marley album to reach the US top ten, Rastaman Vibration made the case for reggae as mainstream pop without compromising any of its spiritual urgency. "Roots Rock Reggae," "Johnny Was," and "War" — a setting of a Haile Selassie speech — showed Marley thinking globally about injustice while remaining grounded in the specific rhythms of Kingston.

Released in June 1980, just eighteen months before Marley's death from cancer at thirty-six, Uprising is his most spiritually focused album — and "Redemption Song," its closing acoustic track, is his most intimate statement: just voice and guitar, an ex-slave telling his children to emancipate themselves from mental slavery. It is one of the most powerful three minutes in popular music.

The second album released in 1973 by the original Wailers lineup contains "Get Up, Stand Up" and "I Shot the Sheriff" — the latter a song that Eric Clapton would take to number one the following year and in doing so introduce Marley's songwriting to a white rock audience. The album is leaner and more political than Catch a Fire, and its brevity gives it an urgency the longer albums sometimes lack.

Released in 1978, Kaya was criticised at the time for being too mellow — a retreat from the political intensity of Exodus. Forty years later it sounds like a collection of some of the most beautiful melodies Marley ever wrote. "Is This Love," "Satisfy My Soul," and "Sun Is Shining" are reggae at its most purely pleasurable, and the album has aged into one of his finest.

While primarily a hip-hop act, Swedish duo Looptroop Rockers' 2008 album Good Things weaves reggae rhythms and Rastafarian consciousness throughout its production, demonstrating how reggae's spiritual DNA has permeated global music far beyond Jamaica. The album's warmth, its commitment to positive messaging, and its melodic intelligence make it a worthy heir to the roots tradition.

Though rooted in Brazilian bossa nova and electronic music, Miroslav Subotic's posthumous 1999 album shares reggae's approach to rhythm — the emphasis on the offbeat, the bass as melody, the groove as the primary carrier of emotion. It is a reminder that reggae's rhythmic innovations have echoed outward into music far from Kingston, enriching every form they touched.

Saxophonist David Sanborn's 1988 album Close-Up drew extensively on Jamaican rhythmic influences, and its production incorporated the smooth, syncopated grooves that connected contemporary R&B to reggae's tradition of groove-first musicianship. The album became one of the best-selling jazz-crossover records of its era and demonstrated how reggae's rhythmic language had become part of the broader vocabulary of popular music.

The 2019 debut from this Congolese-Swedish collective fuses Afrobeat, funk, and reggae into a statement of diasporic identity that demonstrates how reggae's core values — resistance, community, spirituality, the insistence that rhythm is political — translate across cultures and continents. It is the sound of the reggae tradition finding new homes and new voices.

Released in October 1974 after the original Wailers had split, Natty Dread was the first album to feature the I Three backing vocalists and the record that established Marley's international profile. "No Woman, No Cry," "Them Belly Full," and "Rebel Music" showed a songwriter at the peak of his political consciousness and melodic gift.

Released in April 1976 and the first Marley album to reach the US top ten, Rastaman Vibration made the case for reggae as mainstream pop without compromising any of its spiritual urgency. "Roots Rock Reggae," "Johnny Was," and "War" — a setting of a Haile Selassie speech — showed Marley thinking globally about injustice while remaining grounded in the specific rhythms of Kingston.

Released in June 1980, just eighteen months before Marley's death from cancer at thirty-six, Uprising is his most spiritually focused album — and "Redemption Song," its closing acoustic track, is his most intimate statement: just voice and guitar, an ex-slave telling his children to emancipate themselves from mental slavery. It is one of the most powerful three minutes in popular music.

The second album released in 1973 by the original Wailers lineup contains "Get Up, Stand Up" and "I Shot the Sheriff" — the latter a song that Eric Clapton would take to number one the following year and in doing so introduce Marley's songwriting to a white rock audience. The album is leaner and more political than Catch a Fire, and its brevity gives it an urgency the longer albums sometimes lack.

Released in 1978, Kaya was criticised at the time for being too mellow — a retreat from the political intensity of Exodus. Forty years later it sounds like a collection of some of the most beautiful melodies Marley ever wrote. "Is This Love," "Satisfy My Soul," and "Sun Is Shining" are reggae at its most purely pleasurable, and the album has aged into one of his finest.

While primarily a hip-hop act, Swedish duo Looptroop Rockers' 2008 album Good Things weaves reggae rhythms and Rastafarian consciousness throughout its production, demonstrating how reggae's spiritual DNA has permeated global music far beyond Jamaica. The album's warmth, its commitment to positive messaging, and its melodic intelligence make it a worthy heir to the roots tradition.

Though rooted in Brazilian bossa nova and electronic music, Miroslav Subotic's posthumous 1999 album shares reggae's approach to rhythm — the emphasis on the offbeat, the bass as melody, the groove as the primary carrier of emotion. It is a reminder that reggae's rhythmic innovations have echoed outward into music far from Kingston, enriching every form they touched.

Saxophonist David Sanborn's 1988 album Close-Up drew extensively on Jamaican rhythmic influences, and its production incorporated the smooth, syncopated grooves that connected contemporary R&B to reggae's tradition of groove-first musicianship. The album became one of the best-selling jazz-crossover records of its era and demonstrated how reggae's rhythmic language had become part of the broader vocabulary of popular music.

The 2019 debut from this Congolese-Swedish collective fuses Afrobeat, funk, and reggae into a statement of diasporic identity that demonstrates how reggae's core values — resistance, community, spirituality, the insistence that rhythm is political — translate across cultures and continents. It is the sound of the reggae tradition finding new homes and new voices.