Featured Playlist
- 30 Songs
- Blackout · 1982
- Crazy World · 1990
- Love at First Sting · 1984
- Love at First Sting · 1984
- Animal Magnetism · 1980
- Blackout · 1982
- Stranger Things (Soundtrack from the Netflix Original Series) · 1984
- Savage Amusement · 1988
- Love at First Sting · 1984
- Crazy World · 1990
Essential Albums
- The tightest, catchiest Scorpions album at the time of its release, Blackout won the band a whole new audience with its first No. 1 single, “No One Like You.” The song gets to the essence of Scorpions’ massive crossover success: they wrote incredibly lean pop songs but delivered them with the ferocity of a metal band. On top of that, there was something mysterious and even mystical about the vocals of singer Klaus Meine. At a time when every vocalist wanted to sound American, he didn’t, and that set the band apart. The songs on Blackout hit like bottles being knocked off a ledge one by one: “Blackout,” “Can’t Live Without You,” “You Give Me All I Need.” With “Dynamite,” Scorpions kept place with British metal innovators like Iron Maiden, but “Arizona” and “Now!” showed they had a feel for pop music that likeminded bands couldn’t match. Meine’s voice was perfectly suited to ballads like “When the Smoke Is Going Down,” but this effort was all about their rock songs, which were never more efficient or more ingratiating.
- 2004
- 1990
Artist Playlists
- This German band rose from the dark ages of heavy metal.
- The Teutonic titans of metal make their mark onstage.
Singles & EPs
About Scorpions
Scorpions are inarguably the most influential German hard-rock band of all time. The Hanover-formed group have earned this tag from sheer longevity—guitarist/vocalist Rudolf Schenker founded the troupe in 1965, with vocalist Klaus Meine joining five years later—and for cementing heavy metal’s global popularity with incisive songwriting. The fist-pumping 1984 anthem “Rock You Like a Hurricane” was a dramatic antidote to sleazy hard rock, while the 1991 worldwide hit “Wind of Change” is a towering power ballad inspired by the major political shifts happening in the soon-to-be-former Soviet Union that also resonated with other seismic movements, including the fall of the Berlin Wall. Scorpions’ initial attention came mainly in Germany, but support from MTV led to U.S. success starting in the early ’80s, as LPs such as 1982’s Blackout and 1984’s Love at First Sting (thanks to unrelenting singles like “No One Like You” and “Big City Nights”) connected with heavy-music fans. Although the band’s lineup experienced many changes over the years, Meine and Schenker have been steady presences, steering Scorpions through world tours and studio albums while preserving the group’s ability to tap into deeper wells of emotion, as on 2020’s stripped-down, inspirational “Sign Of Hope.”
- ORIGIN
- Hanover, Germany
- FORMED
- 1965
- GENRE
- Hard Rock