The Best Albums to Listen to on a Plane

The French duo's debut album is probably the closest thing to a consensus answer when people ask what to listen to on a plane, and it earns that reputation completely. Moon Safari sounds like floating — Moog synthesisers, gentle drum machines, melodies that drift rather than propel — and its forty-five minutes pass at exactly the pace a long flight requires. "La Femme d'Argent" opens the record with a seven-minute groove that settles you in. "All I Need" and "Kelly Watch the Stars" give you something to hum. "Le Voyage de Pénélope" closes it with something close to grace. Put this on at takeoff and you will not want to take the headphones off until it ends.

Victoria Legrand's voice and Alex Scally's guitar create a sound that exists slightly outside ordinary time — dreamy, humid, unhurried — and Teen Dream is the album where they got every element of that sound exactly right. Listened to through good headphones on a long flight, it produces a specific kind of suspended feeling: you're not quite awake, not quite asleep, somewhere between the two in a way that feels like the emotional equivalent of the view from a window seat at cruising altitude. "Lover of Mine," "Norway," "10 Mile Stereo" — the whole album flows without interruption into something that feels less like a playlist and more like a place you're inhabiting.

Kevin Parker's third album is the most transportive thing in his catalogue: psychedelic pop built from synthesisers and processed drums and a production aesthetic that makes everything sound slightly larger than it should be. Listened to on a plane, it becomes almost hallucinatory — the way "Let It Happen" builds over eight minutes, the way "Eventually" feels like a thought completing itself, the way the whole record exists in a kind of warm electronic haze that pairs perfectly with cloud cover outside the window. One of the defining albums of the 2010s, and the one that most rewards the specific inwardness that long-haul travel produces.

The Norwegian duo's second album is the quietest record on this list and possibly the most perfectly suited to air travel of all of them. Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe play acoustic guitars and sing in close harmony about the specific sadness of distance and disconnection — which is precisely the emotional register that long flights produce. There is almost nothing here: guitar, voice, occasional strings, silence. But the nothing is exquisitely arranged, and the effect of listening to it through noise-cancelling headphones at altitude is close to meditative. "Homesick" and "The Build-Up" are two of the most quietly devastating songs of their era.

Elliott Smith's fourth album — the one that preceded his Good Will Hunting breakthrough and remains his most perfectly sequenced record — is intimate in a way that feels almost intrusive in normal listening conditions but becomes exactly right on a plane. The production is close and dry, Smith's guitar right next to your ear, his voice barely above a whisper on tracks like "Say Yes" and "Between the Bars." There is something about being suspended between two places that makes music about longing and ambivalence land differently, and Either/Or is precisely that kind of music. One of those records that the specific context of a long flight reveals completely.

Sam Beam recorded his debut album on a four-track cassette recorder in Florida, and the lo-fi production — hiss, room sound, the slight imperfection of everything — gives it a warmth and proximity that headphones reveal completely. These are hushed folk songs about the American South, family, faith, and the natural world, delivered so quietly that they feel like something overheard rather than performed. On a plane, particularly a night flight, The Creek Drank the Cradle creates a sense of gentle remove from wherever you are that is genuinely restorative. "Naked as We Came" and "Upward Over the Mountain" are among the most beautiful songs in the singer-songwriter canon.

The Scottish duo's debut album is built from decayed samples and hazy synthesiser textures that sound like childhood memories seen through frosted glass — nostalgic for something you can't quite identify, unsettling in a way that stays just below the threshold of discomfort. Through headphones on a long flight, particularly at night with the cabin lights dimmed, it becomes almost hallucinatory: the engine noise underneath everything, the slight unreality of altitude, and Boards of Canada's particular sonic world combining into something close to a waking dream. One of the most distinctive and fully realised ambient albums in popular music.

The Australian collective's debut album is built entirely from samples — over 3,500 of them, stitched together into something that sounds less like a DJ mix and more like the happiest place you've ever been compressed into seventy-two minutes. Where the other albums on this list are quiet and inward, Since I Left You is joyful and expansive — the sound of travel as pleasure rather than transit, of being somewhere new and not knowing quite what to do with the feeling. The title track's opening sample of a ship's horn and a voice saying "a brand new day" is one of the great album openings in popular music, and perfectly suited to the moment a plane lifts off.