Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Blender
Chicago Tribune
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Entertainment Weekly	A+
Los Angeles Times
Rolling Stone
The Source	4.5/5
USA Today
The Village Voice	C+

The Chronic is the debut studio album by American hip hop recording artist Dr. Dre. It was released on December 15, 1992, by his own record label Death Row Records and distributed by Priority Records. Recording sessions for the album took place in June 1992 at Death Row Studios in Los Angeles and at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood. The album is named after a slang term for high-grade cannabis, and its cover is a homage to Zig-Zag rolling papers. It was Dr. Dre's first solo album after he had departed from hip hop group N.W.A and its label Ruthless Records over a financial dispute. On The Chronic, he included both subtle and direct insults at Ruthless and its owner, former N.W.A member Eazy-E. Although a solo album, it features many appearances by Snoop Dogg, who used the album as a launch pad for his own solo career.

The Chronic peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and had been certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America with sales of 5.7 million copies in the United States, which led to Dr. Dre becoming one of the top ten best-selling American performing artists of 1993. Dr. Dre's production has been noted for popularizing the G-funk subgenre within gangsta rap. The Chronic has been widely regarded as one of the most important and influential albums of the 1990s and regarded by many fans and peers to be one of the most well-produced hip hop albums of all time.

The production on The Chronic was seen as innovative and ground-breaking, and received universal acclaim from critics. AllMusic commented on Dr. Dre's efforts, "Here, Dre established his patented G-funk sound: fat, blunted Parliament-Funkadelic beats, soulful backing vocals, and live instruments in the rolling basslines and whiny synths" and that "For the next four years, it was virtually impossible to hear mainstream hip-hop that wasn't affected in some way by Dre and his patented G-funk." Unlike other hip hop acts (such as The Bomb Squad) that sampled heavily, Dr. Dre only utilized one or few samples per song. In Rolling Stone's The Immortals – The Greatest Artists of All Time, where Dr. Dre was listed at number 56, Kanye West wrote on the album's production quality: "The Chronic is still the hip-hop equivalent to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. It's the benchmark you measure your album against if you're serious."

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