This is the record where the drummer steps out front. Face Value, released in 1981, is Phil Collins’s first album under his own name, and it is built on the worst year of his life to that point: a marriage ending, and the anger and grief of that ending poured straight into the songs. He does not hide the source. He uses it.

The album opens with “In the Air Tonight,” the lead single and the track that would follow him forever, a song so withholding and so heavy that people invented a crime to explain it. The rest of the record moves between that same bruised restraint and flashes of brighter, hornier pop, the work of someone figuring out, in real time, what a Phil Collins solo album even is. Start at track one. It tells you what he came to say.