Perl allocates space automatically, as needed. You can do something like this:

my $tail;
for (1 .. 10) {
    my %record = (
        title => (1950 + $_),
        artist => 'chromatic orchestra',
    );

    # handle first condition
    $tail ||= $record;
    
    $tail->{_prev} = \%record;
    $record{_next} = $tail;
    $tail = \%record;    
}
[download]

Untested, but that's generally one way to do it.

Update: Fastolfe pointed out that since I had changed my mind in the middle about the nature of %record, I should have changed the curly braces to parens. Fixed.