The 8 best Italo Disco tracks of all time
Italo Disco
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.
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Klein + M.B.O. / Dirty Talk
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.
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Charlie / Spacer Woman
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.
Alexander Robotnick / Problèmes d'Amour
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.
Ryan Paris / Dolce Vita
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.
My Mine / Hypnotic Tango
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.
Righeira / Vamos a la Playa
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.
Sueño Latino / Sueño Latino
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.