It’s Hard by The Who

It's Hard, the Who's tenth album, came out in September 1982 on Polydor in Britain and Warner Bros. in America, with Glyn Johns producing, and it's the sound of a band running on fumes and nerve. Pete Townshend was growing weary of the group, and within a year they would split, so there's a tug here between the old power-chord bluster and a sleeker, synthesizer-tinted early-'80s sheen.

"Eminence Front" is the song that has outlasted everything else on the record, a slow, simmering groove that sounds cooler with every passing year, while "Athena" bounds along in full cry. Kenney Jones was on drums for the second and last time on a Who studio album, and it proved to be John Entwistle's farewell too. The band wouldn't make another studio record until Endless Wire, more than two decades later.

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