Disco
The 10 Best Disco
Tracks of All Time
Funk rebuilt for a room where the record never stops. A four-on-the-floor kick, strings, and an extended arrangement designed for a DJ rather than for radio — the first popular music written for the mix.
- Origin
- New York City, 1974
- Tempo
- 110–130 BPM
- Also known as
- four on the floor, philly soul, garage disco
- Tracks
- 10
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
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Curators on Disco
This ranking is the whole scene arguing. These are individuals who gave us their own Disco list, and a reason for every record on it.
Number 1: Donna Summer / I Feel Love
1977 · Casablanca
Giorgio Moroder replaces the band with a Moog sequencer and Summer sings over the top as though nothing unusual is happening. Brian Eno called it the future, correctly, and it is still arriving.
Also on Roots, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 2: MFSB / Love Is the Message
1973 · Philadelphia International
The house band of Philadelphia soul cut the record that became the closing ritual of the Paradise Garage. Not a song so much as a structure DJs spent a decade learning to use.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — What the DJs Kept
Number 3: Chic / Good Times
1979 · Atlantic
Bernard Edwards plays the bassline that hip-hop, post-punk and pop all borrowed within eighteen months. Nile Rodgers leaves so much space in the guitar part that other people's records fit inside it.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — What the DJs Kept
Number 4: Diana Ross / Love Hangover
1976 · Motown
Starts as a slow burn and doubles its tempo halfway through, which no pop single had any business doing. A Motown legend audibly enjoying the fact that the rules had changed.
Number 5: Double Exposure / Ten Percent
1976 · Salsoul
Walter Gibbons's remix was the first commercially released twelve-inch single, and it invented the job. Everything a remixer does — extend, strip, delay the payoff — is already fully formed here.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred, The Waxonia Desk — What the DJs Kept
Number 6: First Choice / Doctor Love
1977 · Gold Mind
Philadelphia grandeur with an unusually mean bassline. Chicago producers sampled it so relentlessly through the eighties that it functions as a founding text for house as much as for disco.
Number 7: Loose Joints / Is It All Over My Face
1980 · West End
Arthur Russell's downtown art project, rescued by a Larry Levan mix that turns a shambles into a groove. The record where disco stops being glossy and starts being strange, which is exactly where house picks it up.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — In the Room, The Waxonia Desk — What the DJs Kept
Number 8: Love Unlimited Orchestra / Love's Theme
1973 · 20th Century
An instrumental of wah-wah guitar and forty strings that went to number one in America. Barry White proved a dance record needed no vocal, no hook and no chorus — only an arrangement.
Number 9: Thelma Houston / Don't Leave Me This Way
1976 · Tamla
The greatest vocal performance in the genre, delivered against an arrangement that keeps withholding the release. Houston sounds like she is negotiating rather than pleading.
Number 10: Labelle / Lady Marmalade
1974 · Epic
New Orleans funk, a Broadway-scale vocal and a lyric that got it banned in several places. Disco at its most confrontational, and a reminder that the genre's politics were never incidental to it.