“Ranking Every Mariah Carey Album”

Mari­ah Carey is one of the best­selling artists of all time, with a stag­ger­ing 19 Num­ber One hits on the Bill­board Hot 100, hold­ing the record as the solo artist with the most chart-top­pers in his­to­ry. But the “Song­bird Supreme” didn’t get here on luck or looks alone.

Carey has released 15 stu­dio albums over the course of her career to date, with almost all of them cer­ti­fied plat­inum or mul­ti­plat­inum for sales of more than 1 mil­lion units. Her 1993 Music Box album was cer­ti­fied dia­mond by the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca, for ship­ments of more than 10 mil­lion copies in the U.S. alone. And three of Carey’s releas­es were nom­i­nat­ed for Album of the Year at the Gram­mys (she’s also received a nod for Pro­duc­er of the Year).

From pop to hip-hop, gospel to R&B, Carey’s albums span gen­res and styles, with the singer’s mul­ti-octave range as beau­ti­ful on ten­der bal­lads as it is pow­er­ful on kiss-off anthems. Paired with her inim­itable lyrics, Carey’s albums have tak­en lis­ten­ers on an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal jour­ney, detail­ing a painful child­hood, a bit­ter divorce, and peri­ods of self-doubt, fol­lowed by a self-pro­claimed eman­ci­pa­tion. Each album offers new sounds to go along with the new sto­ries, giv­ing rise to 15 dis­tinc­tive pieces of work that cast Carey as the diva, the moth­er, and the super­star.

Ahead of the release of her high­ly-antic­i­pat­ed 16th stu­dio album, Here for It All,Rolling Stone ranks all of Carey’s albums, from her break­through self-titled debut in 1990, to her last release, 2018’s Cau­tion.

Carey went through a peri­od of per­son­al upheaval when she record­ed the wordy, Me. I Am Mariah…The Elu­sive Chanteuse. She had just split from then-hus­band Nick Can­non and was going through a man­age­ment change all while recov­er­ing from a shoul­der injury suf­fered on the set of her remix video to lead track, “#Beau­ti­ful.”

Orig­i­nal­ly titled The Art of Let­ting Go, Carey’s 14th stu­dio album was orig­i­nal­ly slat­ed to drop in 2012 but was pushed back due to label issues and the under­whelm­ing per­for­mance of pre­vi­ous­ly planned sin­gles. By the time MIAM was released, the buzz over “#Beau­ti­ful” had sub­sided and Carey was left with an album that lacked anoth­er true hit.

By the time Carey record­ed Rain­bow in 1999, she was at the end of her con­tract with ex-hus­band Tom­my Mottola’s Sony label and itch­ing to free her­self from his con­straints once and for all. Rain­bowmarked the last stu­dio album she owed Sony and the singer record­ed the entire thing in less than three months. The end result is a mix of med­dling R&B cuts and sac­cha­rine bal­lads that are ulti­mate­ly pass­able but unmem­o­rable. “Heart­break­er” (and the Mis­sy Elliott remix) remains one of the singer’s most rous­ing hits, and “Can’t Take That Away (Mariah’s Theme)” is one of the best self-empow­er­ment songs in her cat­a­logue, but every­thing else on the album feels half-baked.