Electric Cafe by Kraftwerk

Electric Café, Kraftwerk's ninth studio album, arrived in 1986 on Kling Klang, produced by Ralf Hütter at their Kling Klang studio, and it went out in English and German versions, plus a limited Spanish edition with Spanish-language takes on "Techno Pop" and "Sex Object". Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos made it the first Kraftwerk LP built mostly on digital instruments, though it was still recorded to analog master tape.

You can hear the shift: the sounds are crisper, glassier, more clipped than the warm hum of the old analog machines, and the grooves lean into sleek, chattering electro. The title track is a cool, deadpan, clattering march, and "Sex Object" is the closest the robots ever came to sounding lonely. It was also the end of an era: Flür left in 1987 and Bartos in 1990. When the album was remastered in 2009, it finally went out under its original working title, Techno Pop.

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