54 albums · 1973–2022

Disco, from Philadelphia and Munich to boogie, Italo disco and the revival of today

· 2 min read · by 1001 Albums

Nile Rodgers in a pale yellow suit and a blue beret playing a white electric guitar at a microphone, a trumpeter in a white shirt beside him
Giorgio Moroder with white hair, in a black shirt, raising his arm over a mixing desk and laptops, a dancing crowd behind himRóisín Murphy in a red feather boa and long red gloves on stage, a drummer and a guitarist behind her under red light
Nile Rodgers of Chic at the Coachella festival in Indio, California, April 2018. Photo: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Giorgio Moroder playing at First Avenue in Minneapolis, September 2018. Photo: Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Róisín Murphy at the BBC 6 Music Festival at the Roundhouse in London, March 2020. Photo: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Disco grew out of the soul music of the early seventies and the clubs of New York, where DJs played records for dancing through the night, in gay, Black and Latin clubs first. In Philadelphia the studio band MFSB laid strings and horns over a steady beat on every count of the bar, and in 1975 records were being made for the dance floor itself, some of them in long mixes for the clubs. In Munich Giorgio Moroder built the sound on synthesizers. After the backlash of 1979 it went on as post-disco and boogie, and later in house and in the dance pop of every decade since.

From Philadelphia and New York come MFSB, Barry White, Gloria Gaynor, Van McCoy and the Trammps, from Miami KC and the Sunshine Band. Donna Summer made her records with Moroder in Munich, and Silver Convention, Boney M. and Baccara came out of Germany too, Cerrone and Space out of France. Chic, Sister Sledge, Sylvester, Village People and the Bee Gees of Saturday Night Fever are here, Tim Maia's Disco Club from Brazil, Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and ABBA's Voulez-Vous. Then Kano's Italo disco, Patrick Cowley's electronic records from San Francisco, Arthur Russell's Dinosaur L, the boogie of D Train and Mtume, and Madonna's first album. The revival runs from Deee-Lite and Daft Punk to Róisín Murphy, Lindstrøm and Todd Terje, and in 2020 Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware and Kylie Minogue each made an album of it.

The list has 54 records from 1973 to 2022. It leaves out the singles and twelve-inch mixes, where much of disco was first heard, the DJ mixes and compilations, the soundtracks beyond Saturday Night Fever, most of Italo disco, which lived on singles, and the albums Deezer does not have, among them Village People's Cruisin', the Salsoul Orchestra's first album and Gazebo's first album. About 44 hours of music, 5 days of a few records each.

By genre

Soul & R&B 51%Pop 23%Electronic 21%Other 5%
  • Soul & R&B 51%
  • Pop 23%
  • Electronic 21%
  • Other 5%

The genres named most: disco, electronic, pop, soul, funk, dance-pop.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 11 countries: United States 30, France 4, Australia 3, Germany 3, United Kingdom 3 and 6 more. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Genres first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.