The 80 Greatest Albums of 1980

Ever savvy about the marketplace, H&O left their Philly soul and folkie periods in the dust and went all New Wave. The makeover forced the duo to tighten up and sharpen their hooks. (If not their lyrics: In “Africa,” Hall feels the need to visit that country and rescue his model girlfriend, on a photo shoot, “before the lions and tigers try to jump on her bones.”) You know the taut, punchy hits — “Kiss on My List,” “You Make My Dreams” — but “United State” is the best Cars knockoff you’ll ever hear. And only these guys could have pulled off the blend of street-corner harmonies and proto-MTV pop in the semi-title song. —D.B.

“I cut your head off and put in my TV set/I use your eyeballs for dials,” Lux Interior proposed on “TV Set,” which opened the Cramps debut. The Cramps tore up the New York punk scene with their leopard-skin vampire look and a psychobilly sound that went way beyond the kitschiest moments of the Ramones or Blondie and into a whole new realm of garage-trash novelty. Recorded in Memphis with Big Star’s Alex Chilton producing, Songs staggers and stomps from “Garbageman” to “Zombie Dance” to “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” like a sock hop in hell you won’t want to leave. —J.D.

Stewart was at the height of his Hollywood excess when he made the wonderfully trashy Foolish Behaviour. As he confessed, “Too much partying, too much booze, and a few too many dabs of recreational cocaine might have had something to do with it.” But the sleaze smells sweet in “She Won’t Dance With Me” and “Oh God, I Wish I Was Home Tonight” — even in the much-maligned hit “Passion,” where he belts, “Even the president needs passion!” He later wrote in his memoir, Rod, “‘Passion,’ on the Foolish Behaviour album, has the distinction of being my mum’s least-favorite song of any that I wrote. In other words, it was a song not even a mother could love.” —R.S. 

Has any punk rocker ever killed off as many memorable characters in one song as Jim Carroll did in “People Who Died”? No way. Carroll was a New York City poet and hustler, author of The Basketball Diaries — you can hear him in the crowd on the Velvet Underground’s Live at Max’s Kansas City chattering about tuinals. Catholic Boy has sardonic satires like “It’s Too Late.” (Second line: “To fall in love with Sharon Tate.”) Carroll died in 2009, but “People Who Died” lives on, a litany of casualties from drugs, war, gang violence, leukemia, hepatitis, bikers, and overdosing on Drano. Spoiler: Tony couldn’t fly! Tony died! —R.S. 

If Dylan fans didn’t get the message of his Christian reawakening on 1979’s Slow Train Coming, he really powered the point home the next year on Saved. Lyrics like “By His truth I can be upright/By His strength I do endure” seemed to come right from a hymnal, obscuring the brilliantness of music to many non-believing fans. This is Dylan at the peak of his vocal powers, and he’s rarely played with a better bunch of musicians. To hear the ultimate versions of these songs, check out the 2017 Bootleg Series edition Trouble No More, where you can hear Dylan performing these songs in front of hostile audiences. —A.G.

Around 1974, blue-collar rocker Bob Seger made a vow to his frenemies in the Eagles: “I’m gonna catch you fuckers!” With 1980’s Against the Wind, he finally did, sort of, seeing his greatest commercial success up to that point with his sleekest and most laid-back album to date. Opening with the goofy “The Horizontal Bop” was a feint — much of the album is devoted to poignant reflections on aging, most effectively on the title track, one of Seger’s masterpieces, which manages to be even more agonizingly nostalgic and freighted with loss than “Night Moves.” —B.H.

Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark were one of the most inventive groups to emerge from the U.K. synth-pop wave, with hits from “Electricity” to “Telegraph” to the Pretty In Pink prom theme, “If You Leave.” Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys were by no means averse to lofty artistic conceits — their next two albums were titled Architecture & Morality and Dazzle Ships. Organisation has OMD’s first and best U.K. smash, “Enola Gay,” an electro-throb dance-floor melodrama that’s about both coming out and nuclear destruction. —R.S. 

Olivia Newton-John starring in a Hollywood musical? With songs by Jeff Lynne? Now that’s poetic cinema! The Xanadu soundtrack was a pleasure dome with glitzy hits from Olivia (“Magic”) and ELO (“All Over the World”). It defined the 1980 hit parade for some fans — including John Lennon. “I love commercial music,” he said that fall, right before his death. “I like Olivia Newton-John singing ‘Magic’ and Donna Summer singing whatever the hell it is she’ll be singing. I like the ELO singing ‘All Over the World.’ I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business.’” Now we are here, in Xanadu. —R.S. 

Echo and Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch was a post-punk wallower with a cocky edge, merging the images of Lou Reed and Jim Morrison into one doomed, swaggering spirit moaning his black-leather blues into the cold, hollow night. On their thrilling debut Crocodiles, the rest of the Bunnymen back him up with the pushy bleakness of Will Sergeants’ ice-dagger guitar and Les Pattinson’s spelunking bass, making “Rescue” and “Pictures on My Wall” the perfect invitations to crawl down into Ian’s hot pit of despair. —J.D. 

The first rap album released on a major label, Kurtis Blow’s debut features his classic single “The Breaks” and, on the funky “Hard Times,” some very little light social realism (“like the cream of the crop and the crop of the cream/beatin’ hard times that is my dream”). The CD reissue also adds his great 1979 hit “Christmas Rappin’,” which followed the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” as one of hip-hop’s very first hits. Blow’s attempts to sing, which include the interesting inclusion of a cover of a BTO’s “Taking Care of Business,” show just how embryonic hip-hop was in album form in 1980. —J.D.

It’s almost like Genesis got a telegram on January 1st, 1980 that read: “It’s the Eighties. Buy a drum machine, cut your hair, and write pop songs.” There are some epic prog songs straight out of the Seventies Genesis playbook on Duke, like the 10-minute “Duke’s Travels/Duke’s End,” but radio-friendly tunes like “Misunderstanding” and “Turn It On Again” are the complete opposite of the music that put them on the map during the prior decade. This was a slick Genesis for the MTV era. It left many old fans enraged, but it soon allowed them to make the move from arenas into football stadiums. —A.G.

“It was a very difficult time,” Sting said diplomatically. “There was a sense of urgency and quite a lot of drugs.” The Police cranked out their third album amid crazy deadline pressure and constant fighting — yet it became a smash hit. As Sting told Rolling Stone in 1983, “I really like about a third of it — ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me,’ ‘When the World Is Running Down,’ ‘Driven to Tears’ — but the rest of it I would happily throw in the dustbin.” He hated the Andy Summers guitar instrumental “Behind My Camel” so much, he tried to bury the tape in the studio garden. (Andy dug it up, but Sting still refused to play bass on it.) —R.S. 

Peter Gabriel inadvertently gave birth to one of the Eighties’ signature sounds on his third self-titled LP when the “gated reverb” effect guest drummer Phil Collins deployed on “Intruder” created a sound that echoed throughout the entire decade, used by everyone from Duran Duran to Bruce Springsteen. Beyond the studio innovations, Peter Gabriel (commonly called Melt or Peter Gabriel III) found the singer leaving the shadow of Genesis for a haunting LP that touches on political assassinations (“Family Snapshot”), the futility of war (“Games Without Frontiers”), and the brutal murder of South African activist Steve Biko (“Biko”). He made more popular albums after this one, but never better ones. —A.G.

Released just one day before the 1980 presidential election, Hawks and Doves is an odd collection of tunes split between newly written country rock songs with a political edge (“Union Man,” “Hawks and Doves”) and tunes from Young’s massive vault of mid-Seventies outtakes (“This Old Homestead,” “Captain Kennedy”). The result is an oddly short record that feels pretty half-cocked, but it was the first release after his disabled son Ben was born, and his priorities were understandably elsewhere at the time. But highlights like the sublime “Little Wing” from the 1974 Homegrown sessions make this an essential listen for Young fans. —A.G.

Coming out of Portland, Oregon, eons before it became a hipster promised land, Wipers was the vehicle for Greg Sage, an Upper Northwest punk shouter/amp punisher, whose playing rivaled better-known indie-punk guitar heroes like Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü or Black Flag’s Greg Ginn; their debut LP brims with relentlessly chugging distortion splurges like “Return of the Rat,” “Tragedy,” and “Mystery,” Kurt Cobain listed it among his favorite albums, and Sage’s songs have been covered by Stephen Malkmus and Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker, among others. —J.D. 

Chaka’s second solo album wasn’t a hit on the level of her 1978 debut (featuring “I’m Every Woman”) or her Rufus records, but it’s a key part of her Queen of Funk mystique. She sets off her jazzy vocal fireworks in “Papillon (a.k.a. Hot Butterfly),” while a young Luther Vandross tells her something good. “Clouds” is an Ashford and Simpson special featuring vocals from Cissy Houston and her 16-year-old daughter, a promising kid named Whitney. In “Nothing’s Gonna Take You Away,” Chaka describes her romantic ideal: “You go barefootin’ when there’s showers/You like to listen to Coltrane for hours.” —R.S.

“It’s your money that we want! And your money we shall have!” Give Adam Ant credit for honesty. The greatest New Romantic poseur of his era, Adam came on as a dandy highwayman dressed in pirate gear, yowling over the Ants’ faux-tribal drums, with the slogan “Antmusic for Sexpeople.” Kings of the Wild Frontier is just one banger after another: “Dog Eat Dog,” “Jolly Roger,” “Press Darlings.” “Physical (You’re So)” was kinky enough for Nine Inch Nails to cover. “It’s all part of presentation,” Adam told Rolling Stone. “I just hope ‘showbiz’ never becomes a dirty word. I love it.” —R.S. 

Robyn Hitchcock led his Cambridge, England, crew through this psychedelic trip, with jingle-jangle Rickenbackers and surreal Syd Barrett-style wordplay. The Soft Boys were out of step with fashion, yet became cult faves in the U.S., where bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements memorized every lick. The centerpiece: “Insanely Jealous,” building from paranoid whispers to crazed guitar clangs. Hitchcock remains one of rock’s great free spirits, while Kimberley Rew founded Katrina and the Waves. Bassist Matthew Seligman tragically died in the Covid-19 pandemic, in April 2020. —R.S.

Dolly Parton pours herself a great big cup of ambition: Nashville’s beloved country queen makes a concept album about class struggle and smashing capitalism. Odd Jobs starts with her hit movie theme “9 to 5,” but she doesn’t stop there. Dolly covers Woody Guthrie for “Deportee” (on immigrant workers), Merle Travis for “Dark as a Dungeon” (on coal miners), and Mel Tillis for “Detroit City” (on the assembly line). In a stunner, she does her feminist version of “House of the Rising Sun,” reminding everyone this song has always been about poor girls. This album is practically Dolly’s Sandinista!, yet she serves it all up with a smile and a cheer. The revolution? Y’all come! —R.S.

As soon as the needle drops on “Double Dare” — vinyl, please, preferably in total darkness, somewhere near a ruined castle — the ritual is underway. Listening to Bauhaus’ debut means the bats have left the bell tower and the witching hour is near. In the Flat Field is one of goth’s founding albums, as Peter Murphy’s vampiric croak meets Daniel Ash’s spectral guitar over the dub-conscious rhythm section. “A God in An Alcove” never fails to summon the black-clad children of the night. —R.S. 

Pete Townshend dabbled in solo work with his 1972 odds-and-sods collection Who Came First and 1977’s Rough Mix, which he created with Ronnie Lane of the Faces, but 1980’s Empty Glass is the true beginning of the guitarist’s career outside of the Who. Pop songs like “Rough Boys,” “Let My Love Open The Door,” and “A Little Is Enough” could have been enormous Who hits, but the fact that he saved them for his own album (and left the dregs for the Who’s 1981’s LP Face Dances) shows where his priorities were at this point in his career. It was no surprise when the group split in 1982. Empty Glass proved he was quite ready to move on without them. —A.G.

The only thing pretty in pink on the Psychedelic Furs’ debut is the album sleeve. Before they became New Wave pinups, the Furs sounded more like experimental, noisy punks, and the album sounds like a grand art project — could they brood and play saxophone? They somehow managed both on “Sister Europe,” trying to out-Roxy Roxy Music, and they came off like a British Jonathan Richman on “We Love You,” as Richard Butler lists his loves (the BBC, Frank Sinatra, bodies that scream). They never sounded as dangerous again. —K.G.

The Fall have the unique ability to craft impossibly catchy songs that simultaneously sound like they’re shaking apart at the seams — Mark E. Smith’s drone, grunts, and yips woven expertly over Dick Dale guitar lines and crazy grooves. Grotesque showcases the band at its best as Smith contorts his voice into all manner of, well, grotesques, as kazoos, snapping snares, and chugging guitars wrestle it all into some kind of sense. “They say I rip off Johnny Rotten,” Smith pronounces in the nearly eight-minute music-industry takedown “C ‘n’ C-S Mithering” — a statement that seems impossible not only considering the Chuck Berry-from-the-Council-Home ditty “The Container Drivers” that follows it, as well as the next few decades of the Fall’s catalog. —B.E.

By the time Roxy Music swiveled into the Eighties, Bryan Ferry was boldly calling their new concept “hairdresser’s music.” Flesh and Blood has sleek Euro-trash synth-pop grooves like “Over You,” while Ferry croons with the brooding-Casanova flair that was already inspiring New Romantic heirs such as Duran Duran and Soft Cell. “Oh Yeah” is the ultimate Roxy torch ballad — Ferry weeps over the song on the radio that reminds him of his secret heartbreak, and he loves every minute of it. Flesh and Blood also upheld the long tradition of the Roxy cover girl, this time with maidens in white togas throwing spears. —R.S.

The Gap Band 3 represented the Wilson brothers’ breakthrough — it was their first album to reach Number One on the R&B charts, and it included their first Number One single, the hard-nosed “Burn Rubber on Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me).” After funk’s florid ensemble period in the late Seventies, the Gap Band helped point the genre in a new direction, ditching horns and orchestral arrangements to refocus songs around a thwacking, pushy rhythm section that anticipated West Coast G-funk. —E.L.

A year after their cockney skinny-tie disco classic “Cool for Cats,” Squeeze blew up with Argybargy, starring the whip-smart songwriting duo of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford. They specialized in comic vignettes about boozy London misfits, from “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)” to “Separate Beds” (“Her father seemed to like me/I helped him fix his car”). Unlike many of their male peers, Squeeze had a knack for creating empathetic, complex female heroines. “You really have to know the characters you’re writing about,” lyricist Difford told Rolling Stone: “The characters in ‘Vicky Verky’ are in ‘Up the Junction.’ They’re kind of a collection of people who drink in a pub across the road from where I live.” —R.S. 

“I’m the pretty-girl-who-can-sing stereotype,” Pat Benatar told Rolling Stone. The former Pat Andrzejewski — the pride of Greenpoint, Brooklyn — was a real tough cookie with a three-octave soprano. She also inspired the youth of America to explore the fashion potential of spandex and headbands. Crimes of Passion is where she put the notch in her lipstick case: “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” “Hell Is for Children,” and her deeply weird mall-rat version of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” Romantic note: Benatar and her guitarist husband Neil Giraldo are still together after 40 years — proving love may not always be a battlefield. —R.S. 

“I’ve been through diamonds/I’ve been through minks/I’ve been through it all/Love *stiiiinks*.” The Geils gang kicked down the door into the Eighties with a surprise New Wave makeover for Boston’s finest blues-rock party monsters. “Love Stinks” got memorably interpreted by Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer, while “Till the Walls Come Tumbling Down” shows off harmonica hero Magic Dick. As motormouth frontman Peter Wolf told Rolling Stone, “I could have put on a three-piece suit and we could’ve gone disco, and maybe have been incredibly successful. It just didn’t feel right. We’ve committed ourselves to doin’ what we’re doin’ — you know, three chords and *unh*! We are not prisoners of rock & roll. We are volunteers.” —R.S.

The Cure were a skeletal Wire-style post-punk band on their 1979 debut, Three Imaginary Boys. With their second album, Robert Smith began his emergence as a goth-pop tunesmith, inspired by Nick Drake and Siouxsie and the Banshees to toy with his gooey, lachrymose aloneness like it was black Silly Putty. Songs like “A Forest” and “Play for Today” are sleek enveloping studies in foppish, deliciously whined mopery that have proved almost impossibly enduring, casting a long pasty shadow over alt-rock history. —J.D.

The Runaways never took off the way they should have, but that didn’t stop Joan Jett from giving radio rock a much-needed kick in the groin as a solo artist. Jett recorded her debut with producer Kenny Laguna and members of Blondie and the Sex Pistols. When she couldn’t find a label to back it, she released it on her own with enough success that Boardwalk Records decided to rerelease it a year later with the new title Bad Reputation. Mixing glam originals with punked-up covers of classic songs like “Shout” and “You Don’t Own Me,” Jett’s debut was a rowdy, cheeky reintroduction to one of rock’s most beloved fire starters. —B.S.

The second, final, and best Swell Maps album opens with a burst of random noise that sounds like a factory gone berserk, setting the tone for the playful, rattletrap homemade music that follows. A linchpin between krautrock, post-punk, and low-fi indie rock, the Birmingham, England, basement band, led by pseudonymous brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks, created their own unique strain of giddily disjointed chaos. For proof see “Let’s Buy a Bridge,” a Pavement song more than a decade ahead of schedule. —J.D.

“And the Cradle Will Rock …” was Van Halen’s first keyboard-centric rock hit, and it shows off David Lee Roth’s wit (“Have you seen Junior’s grades?”), while “Everybody Wants Some!!” was pure psychosexual id, from Roth’s chorus to Eddie Van Halen’s loose-faucet solo. But the real fun here starts after the hits: “Fools” is a jaunty, raucous roadhouse rocker, “Loss of Control” is a frenetic atomic-punk explosion, and the closing track features a rare moment of earnestness from Roth: “Ain’t life grand when you finally hit it?” he asks. “I’m always a sucker for a real good time.” —K.G.

Kate Bush’s third album was a turning point — she got deeply into her synthesizers, using the brand-new Fairlight CMI sampler to open new vistas for her songwriting. Never for Ever showed how much her imagination thrived on this level of control — it led to her next two albums, The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, arguably her two best. “Breathing” is her dark fantasy of an unborn baby contemplating the threat of nuclear war, wondering if she should linger in the womb longer; “The Infant Kiss” is a ghost story where Bush plays a Victorian governess in a haunted house. —R.S.

The departure of Ozzy Osbourne in 1979 was supposed to doom Black Sabbath, but the remaining three members simply brought former Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio into the fold and carried on like nothing happened. Dio brought not only an incredibly rich and dynamic voice into the group, but also lyrics about neon knights, kings and queens, and children of the sea that were unlike anything in the Sabbath canon. It was a fusion of new life for a band that had been repeating itself for the past couple of albums, and one of the great metal albums of the Eighties. —A.G.

Disco may have been nearly dead by the Eighties, but that didn’t mean Donna Summer’s reign was quite done yet. After leaving her controlling, exploitative label Casablanca Records, she found herself on a journey of self-discovery and renewed faith in Christianity. Summer signed to the then-new Geffen Records as their first official artist and strutted out of Studio 54 and into the world of New Wave and rock. Her trusted allies Giorgio Moroder and Peter Bellotte came along for the ride, helping the Queen of Disco earn a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for foot-stomper “Cold Love.” Her faith also takes center stage, with Summer tackling a bit of gospel for closing track “I Believe in Jesus.” —B.S.