For awhile now, I’ve had “Best Debut Albums” written in my notes as a potential theme week. I’ve come close to compiling my list of favorites a couple of times.

But I put the brakes on it because I knew I’d end up with a roster of my usual suspects: Ben Folds Five, R.E.M., Miranda Lambert, The Smiths, Lana Del Rey, The Beatles, Talking Heads, etc., etc. All of those acts have amazing debut albums, sure, but it’s not exactly illuminating for me to trot them out one more time.

I didn’t want to abandon the idea, though, so I decided to give myself some parameters.

First, my list can’t contain any artist I number among my very favorites. So nobody on my personal version of The New York Times’ 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters list. And nobody who would have made that list if I’d expanded it to the non-American, or the non-living for that matter.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of the people on this list. But in most cases, I’m not familiar with all of their work and I’m fine with that.

I also tried to limit myself to debut albums I consider the best thing the artist ever did. That ruled out such fine works as Michael Penn’s March, Lorde’s Pure Heroine, George Michael’s Faith, and the self-titled debuts of Vampire Weekend and Garbage.

Finally, I considered only albums I know extremely well. If I wasn’t very familiar with every single track on the record, I crossed it off the list. So famously strong debuts like those by Boston or The Cars didn’t make the cut because I just haven’t heard them enough.

That got me down to a list of ten great debut albums that I hope won’t be too predictable for regular readers of this blog. I’ll spend the next two weeks rolling them out.

Sade – Diamond Life (1984)

When I wrote about this album as part of the 1984 Decades recap, I was struck by how vividly I remembered every one of its tracks despite not really listening to it for years, if not decades.

Sure, ‘Smooth Operator,’ ‘Your Love is King,’ and ‘Hang on to Your Love’ come immediately to mind, but I wouldn’t have predicted the same for ‘Frankie’s First Affair,’ ‘Cherry Pie,’ ‘Sally,’ or ‘I Will Be Your Friend.’ But it turns out those songs are forever locked in my brain.

That kind of staying power is the sign of a great album, and it’s truly special when a debut pulls it off.

Diamond Life went quadruple Platinum in the U.S. and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. The album produced two top ten hits on the Billboard Hot 100, ‘Your Love is King’ at #8 and ‘Smooth Operator,’ the first of two #1 hits for the band (yes, Sade is a band named after Sade Adu, its lead singer).

This album wasn’t a one-off success. Sade’s next five albums all went Platinum or multi-Platinum, with 1985’s Promise and 1992’s Love Deluxe selling as well as this one. But Diamond Life is the album I will forever associate with this band.