Your best 'first listen' ever

first listen to the self-titled velvet underground in high school made me feel "cool" for the first time

Waxworks by XTC changed everything for me from the second I put it on.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5jZXE3bNPg

^^ this, too, was life altering.

For a recent album experience, the War on Drugs' Lost in a Dream definitely counts. I'm 37 years old, I've been obsessively chasing the musical dragon for a good fifteen years at this point, and I can't believe my favorite album of all time was released in 2014.

lots of roots reggae and ska records on monday nights at a bar in los angeles.

There were probably first listens from my younger days that were more impactful, but the first thing that came to mind when I saw this thread was Bob Dylan's Modern Times. Partly because it was more recent I guess the memory is more vivid, but also partly because as someone who has experienced hearing great old Dylan albums for the first time many times it was my first experience hearing a new Dylan album and really digging it.

Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul. I was staying that summer with a friend who lives in Yakima, a small town over the mountains from Seattle. He lived in a tiny rundown house whose interior was dominated by the drumset that took up most of his living room, and he was a beast on the drums. I had it turned up on his nice stereo system, he comes home in the middle of "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic", hears it, immediately jumps behind his drumset and starts jamming along with it.

There's a number of albums that have utterly floored me on first listen, but probably the most memorable was Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros. Just felt like every song seemed to one up the previous one in terms of beauty and grandeur and eventually left me spent by the end of it.

Enter the Wu-Tang at 14
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere at 19
Salem's King Night at 30 (I know)
Floating Points' Elaenia at 36