Italo Disco
The 8 Best Italo Disco
Tracks of All Time
Disco rebuilt in Italian studios once America had declared disco dead, using cheap synthesisers instead of orchestras and English written by people who did not speak it. Melodramatic, synthetic, and enormously consequential in Chicago.
- Origin
- Italy, 1980
- Tempo
- 115–125 BPM
- Also known as
- italo, italo-disco, spaghetti dance
- Tracks
- 8
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
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Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 1 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
Number 1: Klein + M.B.O. / Dirty Talk
1982 · Zanza
The record Chicago DJs played until the grooves went. Its stark synth bassline and vocoded chorus are more or less the specification house music was built to.
Number 2: Charlie / Spacer Woman
1983 · Mr. Disc
Cold, cavernous and about forty years ahead of the taste that eventually caught up with it. The most reissued, most bootlegged record in the genre, and it deserves the attention.
Number 3: Alexander Robotnick / Problèmes d'Amour
1983 · Fuzz Dance
A Florentine making a French-language record about romantic difficulty over a sequencer that will not sit still. Italo's wit and its melancholy in one four-minute package.
Also on The Eighties
Number 5: Ryan Paris / Dolce Vita
1983 · Discomagic
The genre's biggest hit and its purest expression: an Italian pretending to be a Frenchman singing in English about an Italian film. Sincerity is not the point and never was.
Number 6: My Mine / Hypnotic Tango
1983
Absurd, imperious and completely committed. If you want to know why Italo is loved rather than merely respected, it is records that keep a straight face through something this daft.
Number 7: Righeira / Vamos a la Playa
1983 · CBS
A summer holiday singalong whose lyric is about a beach after a nuclear explosion. The most Italo fact available: nobody dancing to it noticed for years.
Also on Dancing to Bad News
Number 8: Sueño Latino / Sueño Latino
1989 · DFC
An entire record built by looping Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4 and adding birdsong. The closing argument of Italo and the opening argument of Italian house, in the same nine minutes.
Also on Balearic, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred