Ranked list
The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Synth-pop as pop music where the synthesizer is the engine rather than the trim: the British class of 1979 to 1983, their imperial phase, Tokyo's parallel version, and the descendants who kept the form honest afterwards. A record qualifies when the production is doing the songwriting's work as much as the voice is. Records that merely use synthesizers do not. From 1977 to now.
This is the list raver.me could not previously run. The main canons judge electronic music against a dancefloor-first standard, which held vocal-led pop to a stricter bar and kept almost this entire wing out. No New Order, no Depeche Mode, no Numan, no OMD anywhere across five hundred records. That was a defensible scope decision and an obvious hole, and this page is the hole being filled properly rather than apologised for.
The music arrived fast. Punk had told a generation that technical ability was optional, then the price of a synthesizer collapsed, and by 1980 there were bands in Sheffield and Basildon and Liverpool making records that sounded like the future on equipment bought with dole money. Within three years they were on Top of the Pops. Almost no other electronic tradition went from cheap gear to national television that quickly, and none of them wrote as many actual songs on the way.
The other thing to say is that the good ones were never as cold as the reputation. Dare is a record about going out. Violator is a record about wanting things you should not. The machines were the means, and the reason this music outlived the sneering it got at the time is that the writing underneath was always the point.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Depeche Mode — Violator1990
Ten years in and the best thing they ever did. Minimal arrangements, maximal songs, and a sense of restraint that most of the genre never found. The record that took synth-pop from Basildon to arenas without diluting it.
Why it is number one
By 1990 Depeche Mode had been going a decade and could reasonably have been finished. Instead they made the record where the machines finally serve the songs completely. Violator is minimal in a way none of their peers managed: space, a guitar figure, one hook per track, and Martin Gore writing about need with none of the coyness the genre had leaned on for years. Enjoy the Silence is the hit, but Waiting for the Night and Clean are where the album makes its case. It is the point at which synth-pop stopped being a British youth movement and became something a stadium in Los Angeles would sing back at you.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Kraftwerk — The Man-Machine1978
№ 105 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
The grammar everything here speaks. Four men, matching suits, and melodies precise enough to survive being sampled by Detroit, the Bronx and half of Europe. The Model is a pop song that happens to have arrived from the future.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
New Order — Power, Corruption & Lies1983
Post-punk plugged into a sequencer, made by a band who had every reason to stay in mourning and chose the dancefloor instead. Blue Monday sits beside it rather than on it, which tells you how much they had to spare.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
The Human League — Dare1981
Oakey fired his bandmates, recruited two teenagers from a nightclub and made the record that proved all-synth pop could top charts without a guitar in the building. Warmer and cleverer than its reputation, and it is fundamentally a record about going out.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Soft Cell — Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret1981
Northern soul filtered through two machines and a lot of amphetamine. Almond sings like a cabaret act working a room that is emptying, and Ball's arrangements are far stranger than Tainted Love let anyone assume.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
OMD — Architecture & Morality1981
Choral synth-pop about Joan of Arc that sold in the millions. McCluskey and Humphreys built hymns out of tape loops and Mellotron, and nobody has since made experimental pop this popular without embarrassment.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Yellow Magic Orchestra — Solid State Survivor1979
№ 137 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Tokyo's answer to Kraftwerk, and just as consequential. Sakamoto, Hosono and Takahashi wired videogame melody into pop years early, and hip-hop and electro took as much from these records as synth-pop did.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Gary Numan — The Pleasure Principle1979
No guitars, a Polymoog, and a persona built out of alienation and cheekbones. The critics were vicious and the record was right: Cars is the hit, but the album is a colder and more coherent thing than it gets credit for.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
The Knife — Silent Shout2006
№ 186 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
The Dreijers taking the form somewhere genuinely unsettling. Pitched voices, folk horror imagery, and pop structures used as a trap rather than a comfort. The record that proved this tradition still had somewhere to go.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Pet Shop Boys — Actually1987
Literate imperial-phase pop, arch on the surface and considerably sadder underneath. Tennant writes about class and money as well as love, and Lowe's arrangements make the machines sound like they are enjoying themselves.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
New Order — Technique1989
Half of it made in Ibiza and it shows. The most danceable thing they did and the point where their two lives fused.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Depeche Mode — Black Celebration1986
The dark-mood blueprint half the genre still copies. Less disciplined than Violator, more atmospheric.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Yazoo — Upstairs at Eric's1982
Clarke's synths under Alison Moyet's voice. The machine-soul template, and Only You still disarms people.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Sparks — No. 1 in Heaven1979
Moroder producing Sparks, which is arguably where synth-pop starts. Two brothers who saw it coming before anyone.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
John Foxx — Metamatic1980
The most austere British record of the period. Ballardian, gridded, and totally uninterested in warming up.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
OMD — Dazzle Ships1983
Shortwave collage and commercial suicide, later reclaimed as the classic it always was. The bravest record here.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Kraftwerk — Computer World1981
№ 73 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century
Kraftwerk seeing the whole thing coming: data, surveillance, pocket calculators. Ranks high on the 20th-century canon.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Eurythmics — Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)1983
Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart made the record that carried machine-pop past the people already listening to it. The title track is one sequencer figure, a drum machine and a voice, and it has been sampled and covered for forty years without losing what makes it strange. The rest of the album is looser and the peak is very high.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Ultravox — Vienna1980
The grand, European, theatrical pole of British synth-pop. Overwrought by design and it earns the drama.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Synth-Pop Albums
Junior Boys — So This Is Goodbye2006
Cold, precise, heartbroken. The most underrated record in this wing and the one producers still take apart.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Pet Shop Boys — Very
Their house-era record and arguably their best-produced. Actually has the sharper writing, which decides it.
Bjork — Homogenic
Art pop built on strings and beats rather than synth-pop, and it ranks 24th on the 20th-century canon already. A different tradition entirely.
Tubeway Army — Replicas
Numan mid-transformation, with the Polymoog discovered halfway through the sessions. The Pleasure Principle is the finished thought.
Japan — Tin Drum
Art-pop rebuilt on synthetic chinoiserie, and Jansen's drumming is extraordinary. Sits outside because the songs serve the aesthetic rather than the reverse.
Heaven 17 — Penthouse and Pavement
The Human League split producing two good records instead of one. Funkier and more ironic than Dare, and a level below it on songs.
Fever Ray — Fever Ray
Karin Dreijer alone after The Knife, slower and more haunted, with videos that play like folk horror. It sits outside because Silent Shout at number nine is the same voice making the stronger case, and a second entry that measures itself against the first is not a claim on its own.
How this list was built
Ten from 77 assessed. Most of the pool was gathered specifically for this list, because raver.me's main canons excluded the tradition by design and never collected it. The candidates run from 1977 to the present and include the British class of 1979 to 1983, the Tokyo wing, and the modern descendants.
Only three records in this top ten appear on either main raver.me canon: Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra and The Knife. The other seven were never eligible, which is the clearest possible illustration of what a scope rule does. The dancefloor-first standard that governs the 250s is defensible and this page is the other half of the argument. Björk's Homogenic is named in the near misses on scope rather than merit, since it belongs to art pop and already ranks 24th on the 20th-century list.
Every synth-pop / electronic pop record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the synth-pop / electronic pop genre page.