“The Robots” by Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk's "The Robots", "Die Roboter" in the original German, came out as a single in 1978, cut down from the longer version on The Man-Machine, the group's seventh album, with a shortened "Spacelab" on the flip. Ralf Hütter wrote the words, and the music is credited to Hütter, Florian Schneider and Karl Bartos.

It's a deadpan hymn to the obedient machine, a song about robots built to serve and toil for their human masters, delivered by a voice that isn't quite human either: the main vocal was made with speech synthesis and run through a vocoder. A pitched-down voice murmurs lines in Russian at the start and again at the bridge, a wink at the Slavic roots of the word robot. The single reached number 25 in West Germany and 23 in Austria, and 39 on Billboard's dance club chart in the US.

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