Thanks to smartphones and the ever-present internet, CDs ceded power in the late 2000s to digital music. So it's been exciting to watch people (re)discover and embrace vinyl across the last few decades — showing the world that music fans aren't just focused on convenience. The ritual of placing a record on a turntable and dropping a needle to its groove has grown beyond audiophiles. In fact, analog music experienced such a resurgence in popularity that by the late 2010s vinyl shortages had become a growing issue at pressing plants. Want to press your debut EP to wax? Get in line behind Taylor Swift and Radiohead.
The mystique of modern-day vinyl collections quickly led to special colors, deluxe editions, premium editions, exclusive offerings and more. Among the more standard expanded offerings lie those that serve unexpected audio experiences to prized compilations to truly bewildering and even infamous collections. These ridiculous marvels are often affordable only to those with kingly sums of coin, or time, or both, to spend.
Let’s ease ourselves into the outlandish album offerings by starting with a riddle: How do you stretch one album across four?
The Flaming Lips — Zaireeka
A group exercise
In 1997 The Flaming Lips managed to warp how we listen to a record with Zaireeka. To fully experience the album you need:
- A copy of the four disc album
- Four separate playback devices, coordinated to start at the same time
- IDEAL: A few friends or extra fingers to hit START on all four playback devices at once
This was The Flaming Lips’ first experiment in producing their albums in surround sound. And it should be well-known that the band has never shied away from big swings. That they've been able to attempt so many on Warner Bros.' dime is a feat unto itself, and speaks to the label's faith in the band.
Monty Python — Matching Tie and Handkerchief
A game of chance
The packaging of Matching Tie and Handkerchief sports the ribald visual humor that Terry Gilliam had established in Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series. But the real treat comes when you put the record on. There’s nothing deceptive about the first side of the 1973 LP from Britain’s legendary sketch crew.
However, flip it over and you have a 50% chance of hearing something … completely different. Initial pressings of the B-Side had a double groove. Get your hands on a copy of that pressing and, depending on where you drop the needle, one set of tracks will play when you may be expecting the other.
Nearly Anything from The Numero Group
Rich and otherwise overlooked offerings
Chicago archival record label The Numero Group proves you don’t have to take out a second mortgage for an audio experience that’s both engaging and enlightening. The label’s original mission was to help uplift music that history might otherwise pass over. Since then it’s branched out to share musical offerings extending from cosmic cowboys to underground girl groups to emo enigmas.
I first caught the Numero bug sometime around 2010 and rolled the dice on a two LP set of pan-American funk from the Bahamas. From the first notes of “Gonna Build A Nation” I realized I uncovered real treasure — and that was before I devoured the liner notes detailing the history of the music in the collection. Since then, each Numero release I’ve nabbed has held up as the best marriage between style and substance.
Nearly Anything from Mondo
You can never say no
I couldn’t resist getting the soundtrack to the Netflix series Luke Cage. Noted producers and hip-hop royalty Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad came together to conjure new Blacksploitation-inspired sounds … and their offering was presented on bright yellow vinyl. Had I known at the time that the same label would put out a stunning collection of music from Batman the Animated Series I may have had a harder time deciding which to nab.
Mondo presents this dilemma all the time. Wherever your fandom lies, this company likely has a handsome vinyl set just waiting for you. Disposable income Dead Heads rejoice, as The Grateful Dead Movie soundtrack is still available. It’s currently the highest priced item available on the site. An even $450 will net you 10 brightly colored LPs, transporting you back to 1975 San Francisco.
Matt Sweeny & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy — Superwolves
Everything plus the kitchen sink
In 2021 Matt Sweeny (Chavez, Zwan, The Hard Quartet) and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy released a follow-up to their previous collaboration from 16 years prior. The new album’s quiet and vulnerable country-inflected rock stands in contrast to the abundance of … random items on offer in both of its special edition packages.
The “City Beast Bundle” contained your choice of album format (LP, CD or cassette), a 14" x 28" poster of the LP insert painting, a beach towel, a cup and tray set featuring artwork by filmmaker and noted weirdo Harmony Korine, a box of incense (“nasally curated” by Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), a coffee mug featuring a photo of the band and an embroidered hat. Additionally, there was the “Degraded Beast Bundle” that offered a bandana, a four-pack of buttons and Croc Jibbitz in place of the incense, cup, tray and beach towel. Both of these were in the $100 range.
To this day I still dry myself with that beach towel … I went a little nuts during COVID.
Metallica — Reload
A super package for superfans
Metallica was the face of speed metal in the '80s and early '90s. Then came Load in 1996 and Reload in 1997. With these albums the band softened the edges and slowed the pace of the music. It was a new direction, and it brought in new fans. Both albums were met with mixed results from critics, and marked the first time I’d ever seen a song get a sequel. Originalists be damned I guess, because both records were massive sales successes and their singles were MTV fixtures.
Reload recently got the remaster treatment as a 180-gram double LP (CD version too — because why not?). The amount of extra material just skyrockets from here. The band threw in 15 CDs and four DVDs of supplementary unreleased live show footage, rough mixes and demos. Three LPs of live performances were included as well. There’s a poster, a sticker, a print, lyric sheets, a 128-page hardcover book and a handful of Rorschach test cards. While $275 is nothing to sneeze at, if this was your era of Metallica and you have the coin, it’s quite the deal.
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: Vol One
A masterclass in early American music
From Metallica's divisive 1997 offering, we step back 80 years to 1917 for a music experience housed in a frankly astounding package. Ye gods, look at this thing! This Grammy Award-winning collection was originally sold by Third Man Records and contained 800 songs, most of them digital restorations, and many of them were pressed to burled chestnut-colored vinyl.
Among the roster of musicians are giants of early American recordings: Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Son House, Skip James, Ma Rainey and well beyond. If the sheer amount of deep south blues and jazz on display wasn’t staggering enough, the set comes stored in a handcrafted quarter-sawn oak cabinet “with sage velvet upholstery and custom-forged metal hardware.” Aspiring musicologists could bone up on their history with over 500 pages between the included field guide and art books.
To quote one fabled and fedora'd archeologist: “It belongs in a museum!”
Smashing Pumpkins — Machina Aranea Alba
For the Friends and Enemies of Billy Corgan
Shortly after the Smashing Pumpkins called it quits in 2000, rumors began to spread of a final album pressed on vinyl and given to friends of the band. The story goes that Billy Corgan encouraged recipients to digitally dub the albums and spread them across file sharing sites.
It was called Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music and it was to be a story follow-up to both 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God. The faithful uploaded the music to the Internet Archive, where it lived exclusively for over 20 years. Then, in October 2025 Corgan offered Machina Aranea Alba as an official release, including the album’s story, spread across eight silver and black vinyl discs. A copy of this 3,500 limited quantity run can be yours for just shy of $400.
Wu-Tang Clan — Once Upon a Time in Shaolin
Cash rules everything around this story
There was a time when Wu Tang was for the children …
In 2015 Wu-Tang Clan announced its seventh record, One Upon a Time in Shaolin, was going to be one-of-a-kind and not for online distribution. Producer Cilvaringz conceived of the record as more than just an expensive headline grabber. It was meant to start conversations around the value of art in an age of digital ubiquity. Upon completion, the master recordings were destroyed. Two copies were left. One went to vault in Morrocco. The other was bound for auction. Part of deal was the winning rights holder could not profit from the album until the year 2103.
The world let out a collective expletive when it was revealed that the auction winner was also the man who raised the price of an AIDS treatment drug by 5,000%. Then, said pharma bro went to jail for securities fraud, and his assets were sold off by the government to cover his debts. With that leg of the legal saga complete, the rights to the most expensive work of music (by a mile) were acquired by PleaserDAO for $2.38 million. Pleasr began offering the music to the public as NFTs … Neat.
Courtroom drama continued to unfold long after the pharma bro was released from prison. Suits and counter suits have come to overshadow the music at the heart of all this, and frankly it’s exhausting to keep up with who is suing who (let alone why). 2103 can’t come soon enough.
Flaming Lips again but … wow …
A head of its time
This just … Okay … I mean … Alright.
Imagine going to your local record shop with a little more change than usual and saying: “Gimme the song that lasts an entire day.”
To which the clerk then asks, “You want the regular or the one in the human skull?”
In 2011 Wayne Coyne announced The Flaming Lips would be selling a song about death called “7 Skies H3.” The song takes literally 24 hours to hear in full. That’s novel enough, but one very, very limited edition — only 13 in total — would come packaged in a real human skull, for $5,000.
The song was accessible via a USB cable connected to a drive housed within someone’s former head bones. Remember that bit about big swings on the company dime from up top?
My deadline for this article prohibited me from a marathon listen, but don’t let that stop you from shirking time with loved ones and financial obligations! Here's part one.
