5 Iconic Singles Of The '80s That Sound Even Cooler Today

The 1980s were some of music's most experimental and influential years, and more than a few of its many new sounds enjoy a lasting impact to this day. With so many new genres coming into their own, like glam metal, alternative, new wave, post punk, and by the end of the decade, grunge, any hit in the '80s had a chance to spark a new flame, and those that did sound even better today in retrospect.

The '80s was a cornucopia of hit singles from across genres, and hundreds still hold up today as listenable and even legendary. A select few, though, like New Order's "Blue Monday" and Nirvana's "About a Girl," have grown beyond their original appeal and taken on generational importance with the benefit of hindsight. We've collected five such singles here, specifically choosing those that either foreshadowed music to come or directly inspired it. In either case, these five songs gained historical significance by acting as windows to the future, which makes them sound even cooler today.

New Order's beginnings always belied what the band would become, and the same is true of their biggest and most influential hit, "Blue Monday." The band was reformed from the ashes of Joy Division after the death of its singer, songwriter, and overwhelming driving force, Ian Curtis. When they replaced the cult poet with a keyboardist and started exploring synth-pop, anyone would have been justified in their skepticism, and yet New Order succeeded and along the way, helped shape the future of electronic rock. Likewise, "Blue Monday" allegedly began as an attempt to automate a song so that the band could dip out of their concerts while it played, and ended up becoming the best-selling 12-inch single ever.

Though the band didn't pull "Blue Monday" out of nothing — it not only sounds like a descendant of German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk, it even samples them — they still wound the strands of its DNA into something that sounded totally new and totally of the future. The drum beat is pulsing but staccato, a true dance-starter, and strangely, so is the bass line, despite being a sample from an Ennio Morricone cowboy score and boasting all the attitude that comes with it. The infectiousness and snarl place the song halfway between new wave and dance, a new culture-meets-counterculture sound that came to be known as alternative dance. In assembling this sound, New Order ended up influencing an entire generation of musicians after them from both sides of their musical heritage.

The Talking Heads were always ahead of the curve, or at least upside-down and a mile to the side of it, and "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" is one of their singles that demonstrates this foresight with aplomb. The single was the second released from 1983's "Speaking in Tongues" after the similarly timeless-sounding "Burning Down the House," and though it didn't burn down the charts in the same way, its simple, repeated bass loop and warping synth lines sound almost more at home today, when lo-fi, sampling, and DJ-led music has risen to the musical forefront.

The song's unusually repetitive music, which Byrne laughingly described to Stereogum as "a two-bar, one-bar bass line [that] just repeats," wasn't necessarily in vogue at the time. In the same interview, Byrne goes on to jokingly recall how "One of the Steely Dan guys ... was quoted as saying, 'Your songs have one, maybe two chords. You might think about ... learning a few more." Yet the song thrives because of its simple, predictable core, much like the home the song's subject repeatedly comes back to. Over that center, Byrne's oblique lyrical explorations of love soar by contrast, much in the same way a lot of DIY electronic music these days uses simple, repeating hooks as the core to their own explorations of theme and variation.

Nirvana might be the single band most associated with the '90s, and their relative obscurity in the '80s fits within that distinction neatly. When their debut album "Bleach" hit shelves in June of '89, it failed to chart and sold a pretty paltry amount of copies compared to its eventual successors "Nevermind" and "In Utero," only finding significant sales numbers once rereleased during the band's red-hot run in the early '90s. Listening to "Bleach" tracks like "About a Girl," however, makes it clear that the album's unexciting sales were solely due to a lack of exposure and not a lack of talent from the band — and especially not from Kurt Cobain.

Sure, songs like "Blew" sound cooler today because they introduced the world to the simultaneously biting and blasé sound that would come to be known as Nirvana's signature, but "About a Girl" showed, more than anything, that Cobain wasn't just a punk penning angst. In what NME described as Cobain's "first true masterpiece," the artist left the music and structure simple in favor of showcasing his melodic and lyrical prowess.

The verse lyrics that bleed into the chorus are deft, like in "I do, think you fit this shoe / I do, but you have a clue / I'll take advantage while / You hang me out to dry," and Cobain's unusually up-and-down, scalar singing in the chorus is equally so. In retrospect, "About a Girl" was one of the first moments that Nirvana truly felt like the band whose albums would define the '90s.

The Replacements were one of those bands that pioneered a trail between genres, and their brilliant single "Alex Chilton" is a reference to an inspirational artist who did the same, making it a doubly historic time capsule. The Mats, as their fans call them, were a hugely influential band in the '80s thanks to their melding of raucous punk and, especially later as they grew as musicians, their sensitive, insightful songwriting. Where the two intersected lay a blueprint for modern alternative rock.

When the Mats' frontman Paul Westerberg wrote "Alex Chilton," he was honoring not only a friend, but a major influence on his songwriting. Like Westerberg and the Mats in the '80s, Chilton and his band Big Star in the '70s began evolving their sound toward what would today be known as alternative, and fittingly, "Alex Chilton" echoes that evolution. Juxtaposing its standard punk-lite instrumentation is the song's flirtation with unusual form, like its Paul Simon-esque chorus sections, as well as its reverently irreverent lyrics. Presaging the irony of later alternative rock, Westerberg decorates an ode to his hero with lyrics like "If he died in Memphis, then that'd be cool, babe," referencing Elvis's less-than-glamorous final hours and subsequent legend. Neither Big Star nor the Mats ever hit as big as their talent and eventual influence would suggest, but at least "Alex Chilton" exists as an eternal monument to the two bands and their interconnected legacies as forerunners of an entire genre.

From the opening moments of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?," one could swear they were listening to a mid-'90s alternative hit, maybe something shoegaze or Britpop. The thick tremolo of the main guitar line and the tense slide guitar that sounds like an oncoming train feel like they were beamed back to 1985 from a decade in the future. Given how thoroughly the Smiths' influence on later generations has been documented through the years, it's perhaps not a surprise that they sounded like the future because in reality, the future sounded like them.

Morrissey opens "How Soon Is Now?" with the captivating lines "I am the son and the heir / Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar / I am the son and heir / Of nothing in particular." It's some of the most distinctively himself that Morrissey has ever been, with all the witty poetry and dourness fans have come to expect. This is contrasted by the song's music, which sounds so separate from the band's usual thin, jangling, often staccato guitar, like on their other signature, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out." The contrast is indicative of a band like the Smiths, who were always happy to evolve while maintaining a strong lyrical core, and it's one of many reasons the band not only maintain their appeal but sound even cooler today.