Ace of Spades by Motorhead

Ace of Spades, Motörhead's fourth studio album, came tearing out of Bronze Records in 1980, and it sounds like a power trio that has sawn the brakes clean off. Vic Maile produced it, and the lineup is the one most people still mean when they say the name: Lemmy Kilmister on bass and lead vocals, "Fast" Eddie Clarke on guitar and Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor on drums. Lemmy, who had started the band in London in 1975 and was its chief songwriter, bellows the lot like a man trying to be heard over a jet engine.

Call it heavy metal or speed metal if you must; Lemmy always swore it was plain rock and roll with more in common with the punks, and both tribes took Motörhead to heart. The title track is the calling card, a breakneck ode to gambling, the most famous of the band's lyrical vices, and the whole record runs at the kind of velocity the thrash and speed metal crowds would soon be studying for clues.

It became the band's most commercially successful album, climbing to number four on the British album chart, going gold at home by March 1981, with the title track sent out ahead of it as a single that reached 15 on the UK Singles Chart. It was also Motörhead's first release in America, where Mercury handled the distribution, and in 2020 Rolling Stone placed it at 408 on its list of the 500 greatest albums.

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