Krautrock: the essential albums, scene by scene

The double-LP peak of the whole movement. Recorded at Can's own Inner Space studio in a castle near Cologne and released in 1971, Tago Mago is built on Jaki Liebezeit's inhuman metronomic drumming, Holger Czukay's tape-splice edits, and Damo Suzuki — the Japanese vocalist the band found busking in Munich — improvising in a private language. "Halleluwah" alone is eighteen minutes of groove that never repeats and never lets up. If you own one krautrock record, own this one.

Tago Mago's leaner, funkier 1972 sequel, named after a tin of Turkish okra. Where the double album sprawled, Ege Bamyasi tightens everything into hooks — "Vitamin C" and "Spoon" are as close as Can ever came to pop, and "Spoon" actually went top ten in West Germany as a TV theme. The same hypnotic engine, now built for the radio.

Damo Suzuki's last album with the band (1973), and the warmest thing they made — ambient before the word existed, all shimmering water-textures and the twenty-minute "Bel Air." Czukay later said it was the record where the studio finally became the fifth member. Put it on at dusk.

Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother quit Kraftwerk's early lineup and, in 1972, invented the motorik beat — that steady, forward-rushing 4/4 pulse Dinger called the "Apache beat," the sound of a car on an empty autobahn. Conny Plank produced; "Hallogallo" is ten minutes of pure momentum that has been quietly rewiring guitar music ever since (Bowie, Stereolab, Radiohead, every band that ever locked into a groove and refused to leave). Minimal, gorgeous, foundational.

The 1975 third album splits in two: a serene Rother side of drifting beauty, and a Dinger side that snarls and stomps in a way that punk would spend the next two years catching up to. "Hero" is proto-punk a year early. The sound of a partnership flying apart and making art out of the friction.

The hinge of the entire scene. Düsseldorf's Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider had made three albums of fairly typical kosmische experiment; in 1974 they pointed everything at the machine and produced the 22-minute title suite — a road trip rendered in synthesizer, the moment krautrock crossed over into electronic music proper. Everything from synth-pop to techno to hip-hop runs through this record.

By 1977 Kraftwerk had fully become the robots: gleaming, precise, ironic about European identity and utterly futuristic. The title track's rhythm got sampled into the foundation of hip-hop when Afrika Bambaataa built "Planet Rock" on it. Arguably the most influential electronic album ever made — and it sounds like it was beamed in from next year.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, produced by Michael Rother, made this 1974 record of warm, lopsided electronic miniatures — proto-synthpop melodies that wander and squelch and never quite resolve. It's the missing link between krautrock's drift and the ambient pop Eno would chase a few years later. Charming, strange, deeply influential on everything bedroom-electronic since.

The supergroup: Cluster's two members plus Neu!'s Michael Rother, holed up in rural Forst. Brian Eno called them "the world's most important rock group" and later came to record with them. This 1974 debut is where motorik propulsion and Cluster's electronic warmth fuse into something pastoral and weightless — kosmische music with a pulse and a heart.

Klaus Dinger's post-Neu! project, and the bridge to the 1980s. The 1978 album Viva takes the motorik beat and makes it anthemic, almost euphoric — Bowie name-checked it as the soundtrack to the era. Where Neu! was austere, La Düsseldorf is celebratory, the motorik pulse turned into something you could almost call pop.

Out of a Munich political commune came the loudest, most sprawling wing of krautrock. Yeti (1970) is a double album of acid-damaged epic psych — "Archangels Thunderbird," "Cerberus," and a side-long improvised title suite. Heavier and more chaotic than the Düsseldorf school, it's the genre's great freak-out, and the more song-focused entry point to the whole Munich scene.

Florian Fricke abandoned the Moog after one album and turned to piano, oboe, tamboura and voice for this 1972 record of devotional, cross-cultural sacred music. Less rock than ritual, it pointed toward new age and ambient decades early, and Fricke's later soundtracks for Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Nosferatu) made him krautrock's great mystic. Hushed and luminous.

Drummer Mani Neumeier's power trio at its wildest. Ufo (1970) is free-rock pushed to the edge of collapse — Hendrix-damaged guitar, jazz energy, and a sense that the whole thing could fly apart at any second. The rawest, most psychedelic record on this list, and proof the Munich scene had a heavy, improvising heart.

Edgar Froese's group started in Berlin making formless cosmic noise; by 1974's Phaedra, with the sequencer doing the work, they'd invented the gliding, arpeggiated "Berlin School" sound that would feed straight into ambient, new age and decades of film scoring. The title track's pulsing 17-minute drift is the blueprint for synth music as deep-space travelogue.

Before the sequencers, there was the void. Zeit (1972), subtitled "Largo in Four Movements," is a double album of glacial, near-beatless cosmic dread — cellos, Moog, and vast empty space. It's the most demanding, least "rock" record here, and the purest distillation of kosmische as cosmic horror. For the patient; immense once it clicks.

Berlin's heaviest psychedelic explorers. The 1971 debut — Manuel Göttsching's liquid guitar, Klaus Schulze on drums before he went fully electronic — is two side-long tracks: one a build from silence to ecstatic burn, the other pure drift. The platonic ideal of the krautrock long-form jam, all patience and payoff.

The coda, and the bridge to the future. Recorded in 1981, Göttsching's solo album is one hour of looping, hypnotic, sequenced guitar and synth — almost a single track — that house and techno producers later treated as a sacred text (Sueño Latino built a club anthem from it). Krautrock's repetition philosophy, followed all the way to the dancefloor it would help invent.