She’s So Unusual by Cyndi Lauper

She's So Unusual, Cyndi Lauper's first solo album, came out on Portrait in 1983, and it's the sound of a New York club singer who'd already had one false start, with the band Blue Angel, grabbing her second chance by the collar. Manager David Wolff got her the deal, and the record is new wave at heart, laced with synth-pop and pop rock, with that voice, as odd and elastic as it is powerful, running rings around everything.

"Girls Just Want to Have Fun" became a worldwide hit, "Time After Time" gave her a first number one on the Hot 100, and "She Bop" and "All Through the Night" both reached the top five, making her the first woman to pull four top-five singles off one album. It peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and hung around its top forty for 65 weeks, sold more than 16 million copies around the world, won her the Grammy for Best New Artist, and in 2019 went into the National Recording Registry.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.