The Best New Wave Songs of the '80s

Factory pressed FAC 73 in a die-cut floppy-disk sleeve that, per label lore, cost more to make than each copy earned — perfectly Factory, since the record became the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. That stuttering kick-drum intro to 'Blue Monday' is still the sound of a thousand dancefloors resetting. New Order built pop's bridge to the machines and walked across it first.

A 1964 Gloria Jones B-side, rescued from northern soul allnighters and stripped to two synths and a bink-bink: Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' hit UK No. 1, then loitered on the American Hot 100 for a then-record 43 weeks. Marc Almond sings it like gossip he's dying to repeat. The great cover-version argument, settled in under three minutes.

Phil Oakey thought it was the weakest track on Dare and fought Virgin over releasing it — the single he tried to bury became 1981's UK Christmas No. 1 and an American chart-topper the next summer. 'Don't You Want Me' is pop's best two-sided argument, his-and-hers verses over synths that glitter like a film set. Wrong about his own song, magnificently.

An eight-track machine in a Chalk Farm warehouse attic produced the decade's most imperial synth riff. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart handed 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)' to RCA and rode it to US No. 1 in 1983, Lennox delivering the thesis — everybody's looking for something — like a verdict. Poverty-budget recording, throne-room sound.

Two flopped versions came first; then Warner funded an Alan Tarney re-recording and a rotoscoped video, and a-ha's 'Take On Me' went to US No. 1, collecting six MTV Video Music Awards in 1986. The synth hook is perfect, but the falsetto leap in the chorus is the dare — every karaoke night since has tested it and lost.

Sire released the only US top-ten hit Talking Heads ever had — No. 9, from Speaking in Tongues — and it is the funkiest thing on this list by a lap. 'Burning Down the House' grew out of a P-Funk jam the band witnessed: locked groove, shouted non sequiturs, David Byrne treating the title as percussion. Art-funk border case, flagged, and welcome.

Vince Clarke wrote it, Mute released it, and then Clarke walked — his final Depeche Mode single before leaving to form Yazoo and later Erasure. 'Just Can't Get Enough' is synth-pop at its most sugar-pure, a riff so cheerful it survived four decades of football terraces. The sound of a band's first chapter closing at its brightest.

Devolution had a No. 14 hit: Devo's 'Whip It,' on Warner Bros. from Freedom of Choice, smuggled subversion onto radio inside a whipcrack synth riff and drum-machine strut. The energy-dome hats and the video did the rest. Forty years of argument about whether America got the joke; the joke, either way, charted.

MTV played the Sri Lanka-shot video roughly four times a day, and Duran Duran's American breakthrough followed — 'Hungry Like the Wolf' to No. 3, Rio into the top ten behind it. The song earns the airtime: a sequencer purring underneath, that laugh, and a chorus engineered for total confidence. The New Romantic wing's definitive export.

Roland Orzabal had to be talked into recording it — a late, shuffle-beat addition aimed at American radio — and it became Tears for Fears' first US No. 1. 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' floats dread over the friendliest groove of 1985, the title doing the worrying while the guitars glide. The decade summarized in one chorus.

Jane Wiedlin co-wrote it with Terry Hall about their own affair, then the Go-Go's cut it for I.R.S. — and Beauty and the Beat became the first US No. 1 album by an all-female band writing their own songs and playing their own instruments. 'Our Lips Are Sealed' bounces gossip off the sunniest beat in new wave. History and hooks in the same two minutes.

Todd Rundgren produced Forever Now and played the marimba figure himself — the hook that gives 'Love My Way' its glassy sway. The Psychedelic Furs let Richard Butler's rasp float for once instead of slash, and the song became the outsiders' slow-dance anthem, re-adopted by each new generation since. Columbia released it in 1982; it has never really left.

4AD's unlikeliest pop moment: Modern English, label-mates of Bauhaus and Cocteau Twins, wrote a love song set at the end of the world and watched American radio and MTV adopt it while the UK chart never did. 'I Melt with You' strums where its peers sequence, which is exactly why it outlived the format wars. After the Snow, 1982; eternal since.

Aluminum foil, mirrors, and that haircut: the video for 'I Ran (So Far Away)' was low-budget science fiction, and America sent it to No. 9. Under the styling sits real craft — a delayed guitar figure the band rides like a current, verses that lift off on cue. Jive released the debut in 1982; the hair got the headlines, the echo got the imitators.

Weeks after leaving Depeche Mode, Vince Clarke had a new duo and a rawer voice to write for: Alison Moyet, whose blues growl turns Yazoo's 'Don't Go' into synth-pop with a pulse. UK No. 3 on Mute in 1982, billed as Yaz in the States. Proof that sequencers and soul were never opposites — they just hadn't been introduced.

A protest song sung entirely in German reached US No. 2 — held off only by Van Halen — while the UK took an English rewrite to No. 1 instead. Nena's '99 Luftballons' floats toy balloons over the Berlin Wall into accidental apocalypse, the arrangement bouncing while the lyric burns. The Cold War's catchiest artifact, in either language.

A family operation: father Marty and brother Ricky Wilde wrote it, RAK released it, and Kim Wilde delivered 'Kids in America' to UK No. 2 — a British fantasy of American youth that Americans themselves adopted at No. 25. The verse synths prowl, the chorus detonates, and the whoa-oh outlasts empires. New wave's great family-business single.

The Bobby Orlando original flopped; the Stephen Hague re-recording conquered — Parlophone's 1985 'West End Girls' went to No. 1 in both the UK and US, and Pet Shop Boys had their template: Neil Tennant murmuring class observation over a bassline that thinks it's in a film noir. Rap cadence via London deadpan; the decade's most elegant hit.