The Replacements, Let It Be [Super Deluxe]
The band's 1984 landmark gets a triple-disc Super Deluxe Edition.
The Replacements, Let It Be [1984]
★★★★★
The Replacements, Let It Be [Super Deluxe] [2025; 1984]
★★★★
Toward the end of her fine essay in the new Super Deluxe edition of The Replacements’ Let It Be, Elizabeth Nelson notes the album’s “inclusion in nearly every list of greatest rock records ever made.” That may be underselling it. Let It Be entered the rock’n’roll canon early—Rolling Stone placed it at 15 in its special issue spotlighting the 100 Best Albums of the Eighties, just four years after its initial 1984 release—and it’s stayed there for four decades, acknowledged as one of the definitive documents of the American rock underground.
The acclaim is justified and earned, yet Let It Be is also an album that threatens to collapse under the weight of its own reputation. It’s not an album with grand ambitions; it wasn’t designed with tomorrow in mind. More than any other great rock’n’roll album, Let It Be is about the transience of youth, how the moment disappears long before its meaning is understood.
The future is a foreign concept on Let It Be.