Kraftwerk - The Man-Machine

Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine is where the Düsseldorf pioneers perfected their vision of pop built from circuits, offered here as a limited, remastered pressing.

The 1978 follow-up to Trans-Europe Express pushed even further into gleaming, machine-tight electronics. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider produced it at their own Kling Klang Studio, and the results were cleaner and catchier than anything they had made before. Its bold red and black design, inspired by the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, became almost as famous as the music inside.

There are just six tracks, and each one has echoed through decades of synth-pop and techno. "The Robots" opens with that deadpan vocoder chant and a bassline that marches with mechanical precision. "The Model" is the closest Kraftwerk came to a straight pop song, a cool, melodic sketch of fashion and fame that later climbed the UK charts. "Neon Lights" glows with serene, almost romantic warmth, and "Spacelab" floats in orbit on shimmering arpeggios.

More than four decades later, the music still sounds startlingly modern and completely unsentimental, as if beamed in from a future that never quite arrived.

This remastered edition lets every clean line and pulse ring out, which is exactly how a record this precise deserves to be heard.