The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s
Kate Bush, N.W.A., Brian Eno, Madonna, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Sade, Sonic Youth, Janet Jackson, and the other icons who defined a decade
Sometimes it feels like the neon thumbprint of the 1980s never went away. It’s arguably the defining throwback aesthetic of American culture today, from the TV series we reboot to the prints we wear. And when it comes to its music, well, that’s even more ubiquitous: The decade was one of great upheaval and innovation, and the seeds it planted continue to flourish. It was a time when disco and punk were in tatters, its artists rebuilding from the rubble with new innovations to birth hardcore and new wave. Rock was getting more ridiculous, with Aqua-Net to spare, but it was also paring back into the thoughtful nexus that would someday be called “indie rock”—or it was throwing up pentagrams, getting sludgier and meaner, and turning into metal. Jazz and ambient were pushing their experimental borders, getting more cinematic and free. Singer-songwriters in folk and R&B were plumbing new depths of the human experience, getting frank about social and gender politics. And hip-hop was evolving at a head-spinning clip, expanding its reach and ambition along the way.
Now, with hindsight, we’re attempting to look at the ’80s with new eyes—reassessing old favorites, rediscovering undersung gems. And that means, in part, looking at Pitchfork’s own history frankly: Longtime readers may remember that, in 2002, we made a list of The Top 100 Albums of the 1980s. That list was shorter, sure, but it also represented a limited editorial stance we have worked hard to move past; its lack of diversity, both in album selections and contributing critics, does not represent the voice Pitchfork has become. For this new list, we gathered votes from more than 50 full-time staffers and regularly contributing writers to open up our discussion. Our list still reflects the realities of the ’80s—many great artists worked more successfully in singles than in full albums, for example—but we hope it represents the best of what this innovative decade has to offer, as well as how people consume music now. Tune in.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.
Malcolm McLaren was something of a pop music Zelig between 1974 and 1982—he managed the New York Dolls, assembled the Sex Pistols, launched Adam Ant, and then stole Ant’s band for Bow Wow Wow, which turned into an early MTV sensation. Inspired by a 1981 trip to New York, McLaren enlisted super-producer Trevor Horn and conceived of an album under his own name that would pay tribute to social music and dancing from around the globe.
Hip-hop on record was still in its infancy, but McLaren made it the binding force of his album, hiring the World’s Famous Supreme Team (the crew behind one of the first hip-hop radio shows) to contribute vocals and scratches and serve as a kind of Greek chorus. In an era where the average hip-hop track still consisted of rapping over a warmed-over disco groove, McLaren was throwing South African guitar pop, salsa, new wave, and country & western music into the mix. Yes, Duck Rock is an album that we’d now call problematic, with uncredited borrowing from cultures that were not McLaren’s own and a few exoticizing lyrics from McLaren that make you cringe. But it was also a far-reaching pop music document that looked to a future when sounds and songs would zip around the planet and recombine into exciting new forms. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Malcolm McLaren: “Buffalo Gals”
Though it omits some of his best work, including the all-time dancehall classic “Ring the Alarm,” Tenor Saw’s 1985 debut is rightly recognized as a cornerstone of the genre. Not only does this Sugar Minott-produced set deliver the best of Saw’s shallow catalog (the young singer died under mysterious circumstances in Texas only three years after its release), it captures the singular appeal of his spooky yet sonorous wail with songs that speak to each other in a minor-key language all their own. “Roll Call” encapsulates that appeal: Saw transposes the gospel imagery of “When the Saints Go Marching In” to the ghetto heaven of the dancehall, bringing a quasi-religious fervor to his soundsystem boasts. –Eddie “Stats” Houghton
Listen: Tenor Saw: “Roll Call”
The ’80s saw heavy metal engaged in a sort of arms race, as groups across the world set out to one-up each other in a quest to be the heaviest, the most technical, or the most extreme. Mercyful Fate were adept at all three. On Don’t Break the Oath, the Copenhagen quintet were drawing power from the rollicking tempos of hard rock, the neo-classical techniques of prog, and the brutish heaviness of UK standard bearers Venom. Then, on top of that, they threw in King Diamond, a genuine Satanist whose operatic vocals dripped with evil grandeur, but who was also capable of a pathos-laden wail curiously reminiscent of the Cure’s Robert Smith. Thanks to Diamond’s distinctive corpse paint, Mercyful Fate are often pigeonholed as a sort of proto-black metal band. But ultimately, Don’t Break the Oath isn’t great because it’s a roadmap to some future sound; this is ’80s metal in excelsis. –Louis Pattison
Listen: Mercyful Hate: “Gypsy”
Whodini’s Escape is a collection of raps delivered fiercely over beats that sound as huge as basketball echoes off a warehouse floor. After enlisting Run-D.M.C. producer Larry Smith, the New York group originally intended to make a rock-oriented rap album. But when Smith ended up throwing a guitar on Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box,” Whodini instead retreated into severely cropped drum sounds and synths to produce a rap/R&B hybrid that scraped against an outer emptiness. Synths boil and spark on the top of “Freaks Come Out at Night” like oil leaping in a pan. “Friends” is constantly worried by its underlying rhythms, drum machine sequences trembling across each other like spider legs. Escape is an album of compressed explosions; few rap records since have sounded so big with so little detail. –Brad Nelson
Listen: Whodini: “One Love”
Born of Chicago’s burgeoning ’80s house music scene, Virgo’s only LP shares the dreamy yearnings of Mr. Fingers and Joe Smooth while using many of the same Roland drum machines and synthesizers that would define the era. It was largely written in seclusion during a burst of heady collaborative inspiration between producers Eric Lewis and Merwyn Sanders, and it both captures and transcends its moment. Tracks like “Ride” and “Going Thru Life” reach beyond the dancefloor, shimmering like mirages and glowing with an intimate warmth that would make most DJs blush. Virgo is understated throughout, which is perhaps one reason it was so widely slept-on in its time. “Deep” doesn’t begin to cut it: There isn’t a millimeter of wasted space, and each moment surges in confident, monastic introspection. The twisting basslines and searching drums—played by hand without sequencers—take on a human fragility. Listening to Virgo isn’t so much a flashback to Chicago’s house heyday as it is a portal to another dimension. –Daniel Martin-McCormick
Listen: Virgo: “Going Thru Life”
This path-breaking sorcerer of the jazz piano richly deserved—but did not always receive—the support of club owners and record labels. But whenever Cecil Taylor found a supportive new home, he tended to make the most of it. Between 1984 and 1994, Soul Note recorded an unusually vast selection of Taylor’s groups, including the large-ensemble effort “Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants)” and a duo outing with percussion icon Max Roach. Yet the pinnacle is For Olim, an inspired live solo performance of potent improvisational intensity and compositional range. Percussive and experimental from the jump, For Olim also offers some pristine pools of reflection on “Mirror and Water Gazing” and “The Question.” After the rigors of the main set, a sequence of compact encores hints at Taylor’s humor and his ability to channel a wide range of emotional states through his virtuosic playing. –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: Cecil Taylor: “For the Rabbit”
Straight From the Heart is a holy grail in the hip-hop sampling community—its nine pop songs have been clipped, mangled, and remixed by Slum Village, Grandmaster Flash, Common, Will Smith, Mobb Deep, Faith Evans, and more. It was California dance pop prodigy Patrice Rushen’s seventh album and her first commercial breakthrough. The record is powered by the unforgettable energy of “Forget Me Nots,” a once-in-a-lifetime club track that took over the discotheques in Europe and dancefloors of North America with ease. The album itself is as versatile and thoughtful—a genre-hopping collection of jazz, funk, house, and disco that rolls out like a survey of all the fun the ’80s could offer. –Kevin Lozano
Slow, sludgy hardcore punk seems counterintuitive even today, so imagine what it must have sounded like in 1982. Hardcore was still defining itself when Flipper crashed the party on their first full-length. Their lurching beats, heavy bass lines, and sloshing guitars sounded like punk with a hangover, or maybe the Stooges chugging codeine. Yet Flipper’s reject-it-all lyrics, shouted with anger and irony, proved you could be sloppy and still make a point.
It wasn’t always easy to tell exactly what that point was, though. The album’s most famous song, “Sex Bomb,” repeats an empty lyric alongside screams and hoots, as if nothing matters. In other places, Flipper stand up for life—“the only thing worth living for”—and turn nihilism into a blank slate full of potential, much the way Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation” did a half-decade before. Throughout Album - Generic Flipper, the band is bent on upending its own gravity, and sometimes it can all feel like an awesome joke. But Flipper’s first record is much more passionate than a punchline. –Marc Masters
Listen: Flipper: “Life Is Cheap”
Riot grrrl is remembered as ground zero for third-wave feminism, but Salt-N-Pepa were rapping about equality, ambition, and the pursuit of pleasure before Bratmobile could even vote. In retrospect, the debut album by college pals Cheryl “Salt” James and Sandy “Pepa” Denton, with DJ Pamela Greene (soon to be replaced by Spinderella) on the decks, plays like a foundational text of the movement. On Hot, Cool & Vicious, there was no wrong way to be an empowered woman. Career-making hit “Push It” paired the decade’s steamiest synth hook with a dextrous display of female sexual bravado; “Tramp” found them applying the slur to men with one-track minds; “I Desire” was a complete sentence.
Sexuality was always central to Salt-N-Pepa’s music, but it was far from the only thing occupying the rappers’ attention on Hot, Cool & Vicious. Tracks like “Beauty and the Beat” and “My Mic Sounds Nice,” odes to the joy of women believing in themselves and each other enough to make music together, were equally vital to the trio’s appeal. If all-female rap crews are as maddeningly rare in 2018 as they were in 1986, it’s certainly not for lack of worthy role models. –Judy Berman
Listen: Salt-N-Pepa: “Tramp”
It’s hard to imagine a more wrenching cri de coeur than the one that pours from Bronski Beat singer Jimmy Somerville. His countertenor pierces through every song on the British synth-pop band’s unflinching debut, conveying pain, anger, righteousness, and freedom all at once. His howls exorcised the vexing truths of gay life at the time, while finding release in the liberating rhythms of dance music. While many artists of the British synth-pop movement were gay, from Soft Cell’s Marc Almond to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson, none were nearly as political or outspoken as Bronski Beat.
Amazingly, that didn’t stop their tentpole single, “Smalltown Boy”—which dealt with the violence of gay bashing—from hitting No. 3 in their home and cracking the U.S. Top 50. The album also had a sense of humor, found in the cover of Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” where they stressed the song’s sly line of questioning about what’s written in the Bible. The fact that Somerville only performed with Bronski Beat on this album cemented its legacy as a snapshot of proto-queer-pop power. –Jim Farber
Listen: Bronski Beat: “Why?”
Ini Kamoze’s self-titled 1984 debut was not just the introduction of a talented new voice in reggae. It was also the chosen vehicle for riddim twins Sly & Robbie to usher in a new evolution of the reggae beat. Their innovation is apparent from the album’s very first track, “Trouble You a Trouble Me,” slow in tempo but punctuated by rapid-fire digital filling in every bar. It has been described as “robotic reggae,” but similarities have also been noted to the sound of automatic gunfire echoing off concrete walls—sadly, a much more common presence during ’80s Jamaica than robots.
That hard rhythm section is well met by Kamoze’s unique voice and perspective, a Rasta coolly observing ghetto culture with an almost journalistic eye: “Down in the region where I rest/It’s the survival of the hardest/One man well-cool, the next man tense/Some sounds like these across the fence.” A cult favorite, the album’s legendary status was not fully written until Damian “Junior Gong” Marley used Kamoze’s voice—sampled from the second cut, “World-a-Music”—as the sonic cornerstone of his 2005 hit “Welcome to Jamrock”: “Out in the streets, they call it MUR-THERRR!” –Eddie “STATS” Houghton
Listen: Ini Kamoze: “General”
Like a batch of brown acid spiking the American underground, no ’80s band was as hallucinatory and psychosis-inducing as Texas’ Butthole Surfers. Their overwhelming live shows—flaming cymbals! penile-reconstruction videos! frontman Gibby Haynes firing a shotgun!—warped the minds of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, and thousands of punks along the way. And none of their albums captured that live insanity better than Locust Abortion Technician. From the John Wayne Gacy-indebted cover art to the turbid sounds within, the group’s third LP took a chainsaw to hardcore, psychedelic rock, country blues, Black Sabbath, and, on closer “22 Going on 23,” the sound of mooing cows and the agonizing confession of a sexual assault victim. Butchering every notion of good taste in their path, the Butthole Surfers revelled in the most cartoonish and nightmarish aspects of reality without regret. Or, as Haynes put it here: “If you see your mom this weekend, will you be sure to tell her… Satan!” –Andy Beta
Listen: Butthole Surfers: “U.S.S.A.”
If you’ve never actually heard Yoko Ono’s music, you may be surprised by the polish, professionalism, and aesthetic deference here. Released months after John Lennon was shot and killed in front of their apartment building, Season of Glass is, in most senses, a pop-rock album, replete with saxophone breaks and guitar solos, plus nods to doo-wop, disco, and, inevitably, the Beatles. (In the narrative of Ono as an avant-garde firebrand, it’s easy to forget that the album was co-produced by girl-group architect Phil Spector.)
The unsettling, sometimes jarring turn here lies in hearing someone as heartbroken as Ono in the context of music so indifferent and pristine. Like the sight of someone crying in a shopping mall, Season of Glass is touching in part because of how sharply it contrasts the real with the fake, the primitive with the alienated and overly evolved. In the album’s liner notes, Ono wrote that she almost scrapped the album because her voice was choking and cracking, because people told her it wasn’t the right time. Then she realized that there were a lot of people out there whose voices were choking and cracking for one reason or another. It’s not like she had a choice: Her extremely famous husband had died. When asked about her candor in The New York Times, about making an album while still so raw, Ono, fortified by grief, responded rhetorically: “What was I supposed to do, avoid the subject?” –Mike Powell
If anyone still gets sentimental about the Lower East Side of the ’80s, a fantasy land where Madonna and Fab Five Freddy partied with the graffiti artists Futura and Keith Haring, we probably have perfect records like Tom Tom Club to blame. As the bassist and drummer of the Talking Heads, respectively, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz were in love with rubbery grooves and polyrthythms. They might never have formed Tom Tom Club if not for Island Records A&R exec Chris Blackwell, who heard them cover Zapp’s “More Bounce to the Ounce” and asked them to delve deeper. The result is one of those records that is about record collections: Besides having one of the world’s most buoyant grooves, the immortal “Genius of Love” is also a breathless rundown of all the new music electrifying its makers. (“BOHANNON! BOHANNON! JAMES BROOOOWN!”)
Tom Tom Club is music about learning that music can be your entire world, even after you have spent your life in it already: It is a paean to inexhaustible joy. It presents New York as the sort of gleeful interracial paradise that sadly only ever existed inside the music itself; this was the early ’80s, after all, amid the early rumblings of the crack epidemic and the AIDS crisis. But this music, weightless and unconquerable, knows nothing about any of that. It is invincible in its innocence. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Tom Tom Club: “Lorelei”
Like its predecessor, Paul McCartney’s second proper solo album was titled with subtle defiance, forcing the millions who adored the Lennon/McCartney partnership to accept life after the slash mark. A strange, guileless wisp of a synth-pop record, released with the nonchalance of a hiccup from the greatest rock balladeer of all time, McCartney II veers into an eccentric new direction even Beatlemaniacs might not recognize.
McCartney had fiddled with synths before, but this album motors almost entirely on them, its Top 40 choruses distilled to essence below cheery keyboards and tinny drum machines. Its gulping electronic beats are so playful that the record can initially scan as shallow—one long, instrumental furtherance of his “Silly Love Songs” sanguinity—but the skill in its arrangement and embrace of technology doesn’t waver. Originally derided as a novelty, McCartney II is now remarkable in its prescience of the lo-fi and bedroom pop movements. The Cute One could be weird, too. –Stacey Anderson
Once grouped into the Bay Area rap scene, Oakland has become its own hip-hop hub, known for a distinct, simple sound in which the drums kick a little harder and the 808s boom with more intensity. And Oakland’s own Too $hort prophesied this unmistakable vibe with his early albums. Released in 1988, his fifth LP, Life Is...Too $hort, now feels like a glimpse into the following decade. The rapper forced the music industry’s hand, refusing to adhere to their careful language etiquette, beginning songs like “CussWords” by laughing and letting the profanity fly: “To all you bitches, hoes, and all that shit.” Even the instrumentation was ahead of its time, stripping the funk and letting the drums run wild, especially in the incessant hi-hat rattle of “I Ain’t Trippin.” Together, all this made Life Is...Too $hort an early playground for the direction rap would soon embrace. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: Too $hort: “City of Dope”
Recorded in both New York and Bologna, Italy, The Glow of Love is the ultimate cosmopolitan dance record, so well-traveled it seems to have recently arrived from space. Like a Chic album, Glow is designed to magnetize people to a dancefloor, but it also embodies lowercase chic, a luxurious overspill of detail, as if one were watching city lights melt across the window of a limousine. Singer Jocelyn Brown crackles over the first side, but the second side is defined by the low, steady glow of Luther Vandross’ voice. Vandross described the title track at the time as the most beautiful song he’d sung in his life; its sunlit piano figure was eventually sampled for Janet Jackson’s “All for You,” where it was altered to be less about the gentle glow of love than the hard boil of lust. Like other Italo-disco acts, Change’s grooves are drawn to a distant, glittering future; “The End” closes the record by seeming to accelerate up a highway ramp extending into the cosmos. –Brad Nelson
Listen: Change: “Searching”
Campy, subversive, and queer in a decidedly square era, the B-52’s were a party band at heart. After the manic perfection of their 1979 debut put them at the forefront of new wave as well as alongside their Athens, Georgia neighbors R.E.M. in the realm of college rock, Wild Planet doubles down on discarded things like surf rock, exotica, girl groups, and TV theme songs. Their itchy dance grooves are topped by giddy gibberish about everything from digging up spuds in Idaho to being 53 miles west of Venus. But just beneath the bop lie more paranoid elements, from the desperate pleas of “Give Me Back My Man” to the hell ride of “Devil in My Car.” In the face of such fears, the B-52’s offer the only solution possible: Keep dancing out of bounds. –Andy Beta
Listen: The B-52’s: “Private Idaho”
For a snapshot of how life changed for young people in Western Europe between the ’70s and the ’80s, you need only compare ABBA in their 1974 Eurovision triumph with the band that released The Visitors seven years later. Gone are the electric blue pantaloons and giddy songs about love, replaced by somber color schemes and songs about nuclear paranoia, divorce, and the jarring melancholy of watching your child leave for school, knowing on some level you are losing them forever. That makes The Visitors sound incredibly bleak, but ABBA don't really do bleak. Here, their pop is so unbelievably well crafted—from the triumphal synth hook on the title track to the subtly waltzing drums on “Soldiers”—that it always feels like there is some kind of hope behind the tears, the sublime melodies picking you up even as the words knock you down. –Ben Cardew
Listen: ABBA: “The Visitors”
Thirty years on, Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro’s lone solo work remains as enigmatic and inscrutable as the day it was first released. Plux Quba was discovered by wily experimenters like Jim O’Rourke, Mouse on Mars, and Oval in the ’90s; from there, it became an influence on early ’00s clicks-and-cuts aesthetes, adventurous producers like Jan Jelinek and Fennesz, and present-day shapeshifters like Oneohtrix Point Never and Yves Tumor. As such a heady list of admirers suggests, Canavarro’s music eludes easy classification.
Made up of chiming electronics, processed cries and whispers, electroacoustic études, smeared noise, and scrambled lullabies, Plux Quba skips and glitches between one sound world and the next. At first, it can feel jarring and cracked, yet such shards slowly assemble into an exquisite whole. Plux Quba plays like some long-lost memory, conjuring evocative emotions before fragmenting and falling back out of reach again. –Andy Beta
Listen: Nuno Canavarro: “Bruma”