On his visit to the Reichstag in 2023, King Charles III made a throwaway gag about how people nowadays were listening to more “Beatles or Kraftwerk” than “Brahms or Byron”. Notwithstanding how mired in the 70s that comparison was, it still generated a flood (well, a quiet stream) of discourse: WERE Kraftwerk comparable to the Beatles? Surely a band whose main output, whose hits had never reached higher than the top 30 on the Billboard charts, could not have had more influence in music?
Now, I’m never one to talk down the Beatles, but it is true that Kraftwerk may be the most understated band when it comes to musical influence and history. Artists whom we talk about breathlessly nowadays — from Daft Punk to Dua Lipa, from Run-DMC to Taylor Swift, all of them might not have made the music they made if Kraftwerk hadn’t proved that synths weren’t just a gimmick, but serious instruments in their own right. And so it is that on the 50th anniversary of their breakout album1, I’ve decided to do another of my ranking posts, to separate the wheat from the chaff and to encourage you to make your journey through their superb catalogue. After all, we very much need a break from all the intense stuff happening in the world right now.
This post is slightly different to my last two rankings lists in that I had close-to-zero knowledge of Kraftwerk before I started listening to their albums. Sure, “Trans-Europe Express” and “The Model” had seeped into my consciousness through sheer repetition in popular culture, but German electropop is not a thing that gets a lot of airplay in Hong Kong, and anyway the foreign lyrics felt very much like an insurmountable barrier. Aber wisse ich jetzt ein bißchen Deutsch, so any excuse I might have regarding linguistic incapability is out of the way now — but I’m glad I took the plunge anyhow, because there is indeed so much good stuff in their discography to discover.
For most of their career (from Trans-Europa Express onwards), Kraftwerk releases came in both German and English, along with detours into whatever language had caught Ralf and Florian’s fancies. For the purposes of this list, I listened to the German-language versions of the 2009 remasters (popularly known as The Catalogue), and will refer to the tracks by their German titles; when referring to the albums, however, I’ll be using their English names, mostly because Die Mensch-Maschine sounds like a Mel Brooks comedy. As always, feel free to engage in constructive dialogue in the comments, but do remember that there is always a man behind the machine. 🙂
- there’s no consensus on the actual date, but the British Phonographic Industry lists it as Friday the 1st; as I’ve seen this date bandied about before on Wikipedia and elsewhere, I’m accepting it as fact ↩︎
And we begin at the beginning…
11. Kraftwerk (1970)
Don’t let that photo on the fake album cover fool you: this is not the Kraftwerk you know and love here. The band’s first release finds them jamming here and there, using both newfangled electronics and acoustic instruments, while trying to figure out what sounds they can create if they combine them. The problem with such experimentation is that it does not necessarily make for good music: both “Von Himmel Hoch” and “Ruckzuck” (the latter usually cited as a pre-Autobahn highpoint, much to my confusion) seem nothing more than whimsical bursts of sound, cacophonies in search of a sense of direction; I like my music melodic, so it’s a tough listen for me. After this album, two band members promptly split off to create the even more experimental band Neu!, while what was left of Kraftwerk would only get increasingly streamlined — which I say is a godsend from the heavens above.
Favourite track: “Megaherz”
10. Radio-Activity (1975)
This placing is more a me thing than a case of musical incompetence, since it was Radio-Activity — the middle instalment in a trilogy of albums that explored the modern face of Germany — which solidified Kraftwerk’s status as pioneers in electronic music. Looked at in a certain way, the low-frequency hums and beeps and bloops do radiate (heh) a certain charm, and some tracks even convey a sense of wonder at the atomic universe (“Transistor” comes to mind). But most of the time the music here is chilling, discordant and rather monotonously eerie; the title track, with its sombre intonation about how “radioactivity/ is in the air, for you and me” always sounds very post-apocalyptic with nothing to break the depression. In fact, the entire album feels like being trapped in the ruins of Chernobyl long after the meltdown, with nothing for company except long-destroyed machinery. And so for me the bright yellow cover on the remastered version feels like a warning: utter devastation inside. Run away as fast as possible.
Favourite track: “Ohm Sweet Ohm”
9. The Mix (1991)
Remix albums are all the rage these days, but Kraftwerk remixing their OWN album feels like overgilding the lily: the originals were so delicately mixed that any attempt to further “danceify” the tracks would seem unnecessary and ham-fisted. And so it proves here: the new versions of “Die Roboter” and “Trans-Europa Express” are stripped of the deft isolation and subsequent joy of connection that defined them; a decision makes Kraftwerk’s humanity — the soul underneath the machines — much harder to find. However, that’s not to say The Mix is completely unsalvageable: I found myself rather enjoying the new version of “Autobahn”, and the four tracks from Computer World are, much to my chagrin/surprise, just as delightful as the 1981 original. A highlight is the Japanese version of “Taschenrechner”, tacked onto the end of the original as a sort of epilogue and the only “new” song on the album: “Dentaku” just has that immediacy, that giddy embrace of technology, that reflects both the early-90s zeitgeist and a flash of Kraftwerk’s trademark goofy humour.
Favourite track: “Dentaku”
8. Kraftwerk 2 (1972)
An odd thing happened while I was revisiting this album for my roundup: I’d always had an image of this album being directionless and atonal in my mind, a continuation of the anarchic aesthetic from their debut album. But listening to it again, I was struck by how much they’d developed in the fifteen months since their inaugural release: sure, they still sound like two people just tinkling away at their acoustic instruments whenever inspiration hits, but tracks like “Klingklang” (which later served as the name of their studio) carry a definable train of thought and build up to a worthy climax, while “Wellenlänge”’s spaced-out pleasures now come across as relaxing rather than directionless. I still don’t like a lot of the coarser, experimental tracks here — ten seconds of “Atem” or “Harmonika” is more than enough for me — but there are more moments of beauty here than I expected, and it’s a very welcome surprise.
Favourite track: “Klingklang”
7. Electric Café (1986)
Most critics cite this as the point where Kraftwerk fell off the wagon and became trend-chasers instead of trend-setters; five years and six months in the studio, and all they could come up with were SIX tracks? Listening to some of them, it’s hard not to agree (what the hell even is “Sex Objekt”? Why is it so leery?) but the fact remains that even off-game Kraftwerk still makes excellent music. Sure, there may be very little separating “Boing Boom Tschak” from “Techno Pop” from “Musique Non-Stop”, but it’s still a very coherent set of variations that appeal to our base rhythmic urges — the band still use the latter to close out every concert. “Der Telefon-Anruf”, meanwhile, is a surprisingly poignant update of those loneliness themes from their previous album; for that alone, it deserves a much better accolade than “Kraftwerk’s weakest album”. (As we’ve just seen, “Radio-Activity” exists.)
Favourite track: “Der Telefon-Anruf”
6. Ralf and Florian (1973)
If Kraftwerk’s first two albums resemble a prehistoric world in their soundscapes, then their third album is a representation of Earth just before the Industrial Revolution. This is a surprisingly calm and pastoral album: not only do unplugged instruments like flutes or acoustic guitar sit side by side with the synths, but there is also an appreciation of nature and the outside world here — listen to “Heimatklänge”, and you can almost feel the warm summer sunshine on your face, and the breeze brushing against your cheek. But what truly lifts this album up is Ralf and Florian’s childlike innocence and sincerity; never again would they be so playful as to write a 14-minute ode to pineapples — an unequivocal loss for the world of music, I’m sure. If this one feels somewhat low on the list, it’s only because the five albums that surpassed it are out-of-this-world spectacular; but for me Ralf and Florian is still an underrated Kraftwerk classic, and a light but still essential prelude to what comes after.
Favourite track: “Tanzmusik”
5. The Man-Machine (1978)
The album where Kraftwerk solidified their aesthetic, both in artistic direction and musical style. From the very first bleeps and bloops of “Die Roboter”, it’s clear that they’ve catapulted themselves into a proto-cyberpunk future, one where the machines have largely taken over. Yet this future, the band reminds us, is not one to fear: with a careful balance of technology and humanity in these songs, the result is a largely pleasing and always exciting collection of songs. Sometimes it even tips into prettiness — I’ve never been as enamoured with “Neonlicht” as some critics seem to be, but it is very well-constructed and definitely something to luxuriate in. But it’s the ones with the robots and the model that I keep coming back to; with hooks for days and sprinklings of actual humour, these two songs are enough to make a listen-through of the entire album the “KORRRRRREEEEEEEKKT” choice.
Favourite track: “Die Roboter”
4. Computer World (1981)
This album is proof, if it wasn’t already apparent, that Kraftwerk were always way ahead of their time — forty-three years after it was first released, Computer World still sounds like an excellent encapsulation of our technology-obsessed age: the transformation of every little aspect of our life into an endless loop of ones and zeros, as described in the title track and “Nummern”, is instantly recognisable to listeners today. But it’s technology’s side-effect of atomisation and the resultant loneliness that I love the most: in an age of Netflix and dating apps, the coldness of “Computerliebe” is a stunning recreation of an average night for a lonely guy, never comfortable with dealing with people, trying to find solace in screens (I wonder if Jeff Lynne was listening to this when he made “Time”?). The last couple of songs after that are a bit flat for me, but the prescience alone is enough for anyone to keep on playing their little melodies.
Favourite track: “Computer Love/Computerliebe”
3. Tour de France Soundtracks (2003)
After the underwhelm of The Mix and a nice but bewildering track for the 2000 World Expo, Ralf Hütter finally got round to his passion project of writing a whole album on cycling, just in time to miss the 100th anniversary of the Tour de France. But perhaps that slight delay was worth it: in a hard shift from the band’s usual cramped, claustrophobic material, what we have instead is expansive music, full of joie de vivre. For the first time, the band’s technology feels modern rather than futuristic: bright, streamlined, pulsing with an energy you or I might actually recognise. The showpiece of all this is the three-part title track, which sweeps you into a sonic tableau of the French countryside, and invites you to delight in nature and physical exertion. Even when the latter tries a bit too hard (as in the laboured, slightly creepy breathing of “Elektro-Kardiogramm”) this still remains an amazing latter-day effort from the band — one could say that after all these years, man and machine had finally found their perfect harmony.
Favourite track: “Tour de France (Étape 2)”
2. Autobahn (1974)
As regular visitors to my blog will know, I’m a sucker for anything transport-themed, and any artist that makes a 23-minute epic about the pleasures of driving on the famously un-speed-limited German highways immediately gets a tick. But “Autobahn” the song isn’t just endless mind-numbing chants of “wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn” — it’s a meticulously crafted odyssey through the heartlands of North-Rhine Westphalia, and you can practically feel the wind in your hair as the band slide through synths and clatter on the drums. I did a similar journey once with some church uncles, going down from Frankfurt to Nuremberg, and I can testify to how faithfully, how gorgeously, they replicated that thrill of the highway.
The title track gets all the praise, but I would be remiss not to mention side two of this album, which in itself is a pretty little conceptual piece: starting from the deep of night, unsettling in the first “Kometenmelodie” and wondrous in the second, we progress through the small hours, slowly awaiting the Sun’s arrival until we get back to the rustic pleasures of dawn in “Morgenspaziergang”. It’s a nice little farewell to unwired instruments — after this, they would throw themselves wholeheartedly into mechanical artificiality — and it’s surprisingly beautiful.
Favourite track: “Autobahn”
1. Trans-Europe Express (1977)
The train leaves the station. Slowly it gathers speed, the clatter of “Metall auf Metall” ringing in your ears. The scenery changes, and your tour guides calmly direct your attention to it. Sometimes you find yourself in the midst of rivers, fields, forests; other times it is the palaces and hotels in the cities, flashing by with unimaginable speed, that catch your eye; slowly Europe opens up before you, full of endless wide vistas and possibility.
Yet they do not shy away from the darkness of Europe, too: somewhere in there you catch glimpses of your tour guides themselves in the mirror-like windows, warping in the face of their increasing fame. Or perhaps you see, deep within those cityscapes, the artificiality of modern life — the quirkiness of “Schaufensterpuppen” becomes more and more disturbing as the song progresses, the increasing anger and frustration in Ralf Hütter more and more palpable as he struggles to break free of his plastic nature, as he struggles to remain human in an age of increasing technology.
But there is always hope. There is hope, so long as the train moves on, always steady, always propelling itself forward. Of course this album was always going to be at the top of my list; it’s been weeks since I last listened to the title track and I’m still muttering “TRANs. EuROpa. ExPRESS” under my breath; once nestled in your head, that is not a riff that extricates itself easily. But what I love most about Trans-Europe Express is how triumphant it makes the act of connection sound. Each new destination — Vienna, Paris, Düsseldorf City — is heralded with a blast on the synths; each new human discovered — be it Franz Schubert or David Bowie — is another link in the shared culture of Europe. Under the calm hand of your guides, the train never stops travelling, never stops unfolding; witness how the title track shifts and transmogrifies, how that central riff adapts itself to different environments.
And this, for me, is why Trans-Europe Express is Kraftwerk’s greatest album. In between its metallic clatters and changing soundscapes, it reminds its listeners of the inherent joys of discovery: of the endless treasures that await in travel, of the endless endless new relationships you can forge, and of the basic fact that somewhere on the other side of the machine, behind all the synths and the distorted voices, there still lies a human after all. Not bad for four showroom dummies.
Also: someone in the YouTube comments mentioned that “the train kind of looks like a happy whale”, and now I can’t get that image out of my mind.
Favourite track: “Trans-Europa Express”
Thanks for reading! This’ll probably be my last musical ranking piece, I think the trilogy of ELO-ABBA-Kraftwerk forms the perfect triptych, and more to the point I’ve run out of bands who I know the lore well enough to write about. But also I don’t want to rely on ranking pieces to draw people to my blog; I write on a great deal of other stuff as well, and I’d really appreciate it if you read some of those too… in any case, hope you’ve enjoyed this piece, and I’ll see you around for the other stuff!
(pauses, glances longingly at Siouxsie and the Banshees)
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 