Nebraska

There are no winners in Nebraska—a bleak sonic landscape where America’s dispossessed are ground into dust by social forces beyond their control. There’s the drifting murderer of the title track; a child whose family slaves away beneath a “Mansion On the Hill”; and a hard-luck guy forced to kill for the mob in “Atlantic City.” Springsteen’s darkest record is also his sparest: just voice and guitar lost in a sea of lonely reverb. There's an almost bone-chilling starkness to these songs, but they're deeply moving too.