A theme · all themes
The Eighties
Thirteen records, ten of our rankings, ten years. The decade cheap machines and cheap pressings reached people with no access to a record industry, told through the labels they had to start instead.
What gets in, and what does not
Released between 1980 and 1989, and made outside the industry that was selling the decade — the label has to be the makers' own or their scene's. A great eighties record made on a major's budget does not qualify, however much the decade is remembered for it.
Every record here is already in one of our rankings — a theme re-cuts what the site has vouched for, and vouches for nothing new. These ones come from:
Bleep TechnoChicago HouseDancehallDetroit TechnoDream PopGrungeHardcore PunkItalo DiscoMiami BassPost-Punk
- Picks
- 13
- Drawn from
- 10 rankings
- Years
- 1980–1989
- Curator
- The Waxonia Desk
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Take 11 of 13 to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
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. 2 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
The records — selected, not ranked
Joy Division / Love Will Tear Us Apart
1980 · Factory
Factory gave its bands the copyrights and had no contracts to speak of, which was ruinous as a business and is the reason this record sounds like nobody was consulted. The decade's most covered song, released by a Manchester club with a design habit.
Also on Post-Punk, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Black Flag / Rise Above
1981 · SST
Greg Ginn ran SST out of his own electronics business and put out the records nobody would touch. American hardcore did not get signed; it built a distribution network out of vans and mail order, and this is the record at the front of it.
Also on Hardcore Punk
Minor Threat / Straight Edge
1981 · Dischord
Forty-six seconds, on a label the band started to release it, which still caps its record prices four decades later. The clearest case here of the economics and the content being the same argument.
Also on Hardcore Punk
Klein + M.B.O. / Dirty Talk
1982 · Zanza
Milan working out what to do with a drum machine two years before anyone called it Italo. Made cheaply for clubs, exported by accident, and played in New York and Chicago by DJs who had no idea where it came from.
Alexander Robotnick / Problèmes d'Amour
1983 · Fuzz Dance
A one-man record on a tiny Florentine imprint that outlasted most of the decade's budgets. Italo is the purest example of the criterion: no industry behind it at all, and it ended up under half of house music.
Also on Italo Disco
Cocteau Twins / Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops
1984 · 4AD
4AD was Ivo Watts-Russell's shop-front operation and it let a band invent a vocabulary — no lyrics anyone can transcribe, a guitar treated as weather. No A&R department in 1984 would have commissioned this and none had to.
Also on Dream Pop
Model 500 / No UFO's
1985 · Metroplex
Juan Atkins pressed it himself on his own label, in a city whose record industry had left for Los Angeles fifteen years earlier. Techno starts as a self-released twelve-inch, which is a fact about Detroit as much as about the music.
Also on Detroit Techno, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit Techno, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Tenor Saw / Ring the Alarm
1985 · Techniques
Winston Riley's own Kingston label, a rhythm reused for the next thirty years, and no multinational anywhere near it. Jamaica had been running the model this whole list describes since long before the decade started.
Also on Dancehall
2 Live Crew / Throw the D
1986 · Luke Skyywalker
Luke Campbell named the label after himself because there was no other way to release it, and later took its obscenity case to a federal appeals court. The most literal instance here of a scene having to build its own way out.
Also on Miami Bass, Miami
Mr. Fingers / Can You Feel It
1986 · Trax
Trax pressed on recycled vinyl and paid almost nobody, which is a real part of the story and not a footnote. It also put out the record that defines house, made by one man in an apartment on borrowed equipment.
Also on Chicago House, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — In the Room, The Waxonia Desk — Looped and Filtered, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Rhythim Is Rhythim / Strings of Life
1987 · Transmat
Derrick May's own label again, and the record the rest of the decade gets measured against. No chorus, no bassline for most of it, and no committee anywhere that would have let it out at that length.
Also on Detroit Techno, The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — Detroit, Heard in Europe, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Mudhoney / Touch Me I'm Sick
1988 · Sub Pop
Sub Pop was two men, a loan and a singles club, and this is the record that made the subscription worth having. Everything the next decade sold by the million was worked out here for the price of a session.
Also on Grunge
Forgemasters / Track With No Name
1989 · Warp
Funded by an enterprise grant, named after a steelworks, released by a Sheffield record shop. The decade ends with a public body accidentally paying for the first Warp single, which is as good a summary of the whole argument as exists.
Also on Bleep Techno, Warp
Who made this
The people who write the rankings on this site. We keep the lists honest, we argue about the order, and we get asked the same question more than any other: where should someone actually start. These are our answers.