Deep Dive: Kraftwerk, COMPUTER WORLD

It’s Ralf Hütter’s birthday, and as the lead singer, keyboardist, founding member and leader of Kraftwerk, it seemed only appropriate to take a look back at one of his band’s albums today.

The album we’ve selected? COMPUTER WORLD, the band’s eighth album, which was released in 1981 and provided them with a hit single that only bubbled under the Billboard Hot 100 but ended up climbing all the way to #2 in Italy. That song? The one and only “Pocket Calculator.”

As you might reasonably presume from its title (and if you did presume this, then you would be spot on), COMPUTER WORLD was an album about the rise of computers in society, which makes it arguably even more relevant today than it was when it was originally released. It was critically acclaimed when it hit record store shelves, being listed in New Musical Express’s top 10 albums of the year, and it’s held up well enough to have been included in Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the ’80s. If you’ve never heard it, then you should remedy that situation right now…and once you’ve done so, feel free to marvel at how modern it sounds for an album that’s 37 years old!