Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run is the first album I'll recommend to anyone within earshot who mentions casually they want to explore more of his discography. It is the quintessential distillation of an everlasting American summer night spread across eight tracks, the yearning of Clarence Clemons' sax solo in Jungleland, the longing to break out of physical and societal confines, cars that don't have to drive fast but just fast enough to escape small towns, bad jobs and to arrive at a promised land with prospects of love, a better life, and laughter with friends romantic and platonic, the ambiguous gender of Terry in Backstreets leading to many an academic discussion of the inherent queerness in his lyrics, and just that magnificent wall of sound that even if you strip away the backing melodies, the lyrics are still just so poignant and strike deep into the core of your heart. Even the album art, in the 1970s when most fonts chosen were big and bombastic, a stark and slim looking font as skinny as a 25 year old Springsteen on the front cover, and when opened up to show him leaning on Clarence playing his sax
In his autobiography, he wrote his songs of a world where his friendship with someone outside his race wouldn't be so taboo. In the 70s and 80s, they would do the most rock n roll thing they could do to uplift the people who believe in a better and more accepting world and piss off the detractors who would rather see them dead and let them know their old ways of thinking are dying and no longer the norm.
There are many a ways I could wax poetic of his music and how it inspires me throughout many situations in my life, but that's probably the basic gist before I go into an academic research essay when I should be working lol
But also Boston's self-titled debut album, Carly Rae Jepsen's E-Mo-Tion, The Weeknd's Dawn FM, The Gaslight Anthem's '59 Sound, and probably a few others I can't recall that I would categorize as a "perfect" album.