Aaliyah: Ultimate Aaliyah (3LP) [BLACKGROUND]

Why you'll love it

This 3LP set folds out of a six-panel gatefold jacket, pressed in Canada for Blackground Records 2.0. When the collection came back in 2021 it debuted at No. 41 on the Billboard 200, and in 2022 it reached No. 3 on the UK R&B Albums chart.

This edition

• 3LP set
• Six-panel gatefold jacket
• Pressed in Canada

About the album

Some singers need a whole career to find their sound. Aaliyah found hers in her teens, in a studio with two newcomers called Timbaland and Missy Elliott, and the stuttering, spacious R&B they built together still sounds like next week. Ultimate Aaliyah first gathered the story in 2005, and Blackground brought it back once her catalogue reached streaming.

The first two LPs run through the hits: "Back and Forth," the Isley Brothers cover "At Your Best," "One in a Million" and "4 Page Letter," then the Timbaland years in full flight with "Are You That Somebody," "Try Again," "More Than a Woman" and "Rock the Boat." "Try Again" made history as the first song to top the Hot 100 on radio airplay alone. The third LP digs into deeper cuts like "I Care 4 U," "Messed Up" and "I Am Music."

Her albums have sold somewhere between 24 and 32 million copies worldwide, and the hits here explain most of them. Three LPs is roughly the right amount of Aaliyah for one evening, though nobody in the shop has yet managed to stop at three.

Also at Kops: more Aaliyah on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Blackground Records 2.0 (cat# ERE678), a reissue of the 2005 compilation.