Despite forming in 1970, Kraftwerk’s imperial period didn’t begin until four years later with the release of Autobahn, home to the nearly 23-minute title track. Things gelled on this cinematic journey that endeavored to recreate the feeling of cruising along a Germany highway. For the next seven years, Kraftwerk released a series of masterpieces, peaking in 1977 with Trans-Europe Express.
Perhaps this is why the album between Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express isn’t as revered as these two legendary electronic music releases. However, Warner and Parlophone Records are reissuing Radio-Activity for its 50th anniversary. Fans can purchase vinyl, digital, and Blu-ray editions, including a new Dolby Atmos mix by Ralf Hütter and Fritz Hilpert from the original 16-track tapes on the Blu-ray disc.
Though the title may evoke fears of nuclear annihilation, Radio-Activity also explores themes of communication via broadcast radio. This is an intentional pun, as about half the songs are about activity on the radio (“Radioland,” “Airwaves”) while others are about radioactivity (“Uranium”).
The record is more experimental than Autobahn, as the group explored willfully strange sounds such as oscillators and radio static. Opening track “Geiger Counter” is a minute of phase and repetitive pulsations. The album is also the first Kraftwerk record that is completely electronic and the first to feature the “classic” Kraftwerk lineup of Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, both providing vocals, synths, and more, and Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür on electronic percussion.
The record’s only single—“Radioactivity”—is also its most memorable. Behind a deliciously simple synth line, Hütter sings in English, “Radioactivity / Is in the air for you and me,” a line that can be interpreted both about radio waves and nuclear particles. This album features Hütter and Schneider singing in both English and German. Kraftwerk would release their subsequent records in separate English and German versions, making this the last record to feature both languages together.
Many critics didn’t know what to make of Radio-Activity upon release, especially following the joyous Autobahn. Rolling Stone panned it, claiming that “no cut on the album comes near the melodic/harmonic sense that pervaded Autobahn.” Yet, divorced from what came before and right after, Radio-Activity served as an experimental waypoint that found Kraftwerk still willing to test out new sonic pathways before perfecting the fusion of avant-garde and accessible. Within the context of the impending nuclear disasters that followed its release (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl), Radio-Activity has a forward-looking chilling effect. However, Kraftwerk is celebrating a very different technology here, one that was revolutionary at the beginning of the 20th century but rendered quaint in the ’70s. Fifty years on, there is nothing quaint about Radio-Activity, which may not be Kraftwerk’s defining record, but likely its most daring.
