OK, I had another look and think I should have named this “Album view sorted by path name rather than album name”.
I created a test share and put a couple of albums:
Coldplay - Live 2012/
Dire Straits - Love Over Gold/
Foo Fighters - Wasting Light/
Garbage - Bleed Like Me/
Imagine Dragons - Evolve [Deluxe Edition]/
Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker/
Muse - Absolution/
Muse - Showbiz/
Rammstein - Herzeleid/
The Cult - Love/
The album view is like this:

Next, I moved the music into two subdirectories:
dir1/
dir1/Dire Straits - Love Over Gold/
dir1/Garbage - Bleed Like Me/
dir1/Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker/
dir1/Muse - Showbiz/
dir1/The Cult - Love/
dir2/
dir2/Coldplay - Live 2012/
dir2/Foo Fighters - Wasting Light/
dir2/Imagine Dragons - Evolve [Deluxe Edition]/
dir2/Muse - Absolution/
dir2/Rammstein - Herzeleid/
dir2/The Who - Tommy/
The album view is no longer sorted by artist:

Finally, I put everything back in the top-level directory but renamed the path names like this:
01 - Foo Fighters - Wasting Light/
02 - The Cult - Love/
03 - Rammstein - Herzeleid/
04 - Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker/
05 - Muse - Showbiz/
06 - Imagine Dragons - Evolve [Deluxe Edition]/
07 - Muse - Absolution/
08 - Dire Straits - Love Over Gold/
09 - Garbage - Bleed Like Me/
10 - The Who - Tommy/
11 - Coldplay - Live 2012 /
The album view follows:

It seems that (unlike the artist and genre views), the album view follows the filesystem layout and is not a database view.
My actual media library is > 90K files, so you can imagine that I use something a bit more elaborate than “all albums in their own dir under a single share” to store it. Unfortunately, this makes the album view rather useless as it’s impossible to find anything in a view of thousands of albums if they’re not sorted.
Is this intentional, not implemented or a bug?