Thriller

Jones produced and Bruce Swedien engineered. Recording ran from April to November 1982 at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles on a budget of $750,000. The first official session, on 14 April 1982, was Jackson and Paul McCartney recording The Girl Is Mine. Jones and Jackson worked on 30 songs and nine made the album. Jackson wrote four of them, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', The Girl Is Mine, Beat It and Billie Jean, dictating them into a recorder instead of writing them down. Members of Toto played on the record. Rod Temperton wrote the title song, and Vincent Price recited its closing lines in two takes. Jackson had said he wanted an album where every song was a killer. When it was finished, he and Jones were unhappy with the result and remixed every song, spending a week on each. They left off a cover of Behind the Mask when the parties could not agree on royalties.

Released by Epic on 29 November 1982, it reached number one on the Billboard Top LPs and Tape chart on 26 February 1983 and spent a record 37 weeks there. It was the best-selling album worldwide in 1983, and it has sold an estimated 70 million copies. Seven singles were released, and all seven reached the top ten of the Hot 100, a record for one album. Billie Jean and Beat It went to number one. At the 26th Grammy Awards it won a record eight Grammys, including Album of the Year, with Jackson taking seven and Swedien the eighth. John Rockwell of The New York Times called it "a wonderful pop record" when it came out, while Gavin Martin of NME was underwhelmed. Rolling Stone ranked it 12 on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums. In 2008 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.