Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Hot Press	12/12
Mojo
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Select	5/5
Uncut
The Village Voice	B+

Rain Dogs is the eighth album by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, released in September 1985 on Island Records. A loose concept album about "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, Rain Dogs is generally considered the middle album of a trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years.

The album, which includes appearances by guitarists Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, is noted for its broad spectrum of musical styles and genres, described by Rolling Stone as merging "Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, [and] the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass, into a singularly idiosyncratic American style."

The album peaked at #29 on the UK charts and #188 on the US Billboard Top 200. In 1989, it was ranked #21 on the Rolling Stone list of the "100 greatest albums of the 1980s." In 2003, the album was ranked number 397 on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Waits wrote the majority of the album in a two-month stint in the fall of 1984 in a basement room at the corner of Washington and Horatio Streets in Manhattan. According to Waits, it was:

kind of a rough area, Lower Manhattan between Canal and 14th street, just about a block from the river ... It was a good place for me to work. Very quiet, except for the water coming through the pipes every now and then. Sort of like being in a vault.

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Wikipedia