Big synths, arena drums, and a cartoon bear drifting through a Takashi Murakami sky. Graduation arrived on September 11, 2007, the third Kanye West album for Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella, pulled together from sessions that ran between 2005 and 2007 in studios across New York and Los Angeles.

West produced most of it himself, with DJ Toomp and a handful of others in the chairs beside him. The sped-up soul loops of his first two records step back in favour of electronic keyboards, stacked vocal chants and choruses shaped for stadium PA systems. Verses get shorter, the hooks get wider, and the mixes leave room for a synth line to carry an entire room.

The guest list stays small and odd for a rap album at this scale: Chris Martin at a piano, T-Pain on a hook, Dwele singing a refrain, plus verses and turntable work from Lil Wayne, Mos Def and DJ Premier. Nobody crowds the record.

Anyone who came to hip-hop through pop radio will find this the easiest entry point in the catalogue, and anyone tracking the genre's late-2000s move toward synthesizers and sung choruses will find much of that shift starting here. The Dropout Bear cover and the Murakami interior art belong to the same push, a rap album packaged as a pop event.