10 Best Rock Music Album Closers Of The 1980s
Finishing strongly is essential in music, and these albums all did just that.
Isn't it such a shame when a brilliant album ends on a right old dud? All that build-up, all that amazing work, only for the whole thing to fizzle out like a cheap firework. What a let down!
The final track on an album is also the final impression any listener will have of it. If it's good, it could help them remember the record more fondly. If it's bad, it could sink the whole thing.
Luckily, this list is full of songs that succeeded in closing out albums in strong fashion.
The 1980s was a bumper time for rock albums, as hair metal made its presence known, thrash took over the world, and the gentle rumblings of the '90s indie movement grew stronger. With great albums come great album closers, and the following ten are great examples of how to round off a project right.
Closing tracks are much harder to find than, say, opening songs. Artists seem more keen to frontload their albums than rearload them (if that's even a word), so some of these songs are less famous than others.
Regardless, they are all brilliant final flourishes to some of the greatest albums of the entire decade.
10. Still Loving You - Scorpions (Love At First Sting)
Though they've put out plenty of bangers in their near-60 year history, the one track most people will know German band Scorpions for is Rock You Like a Hurricane. And that's not just because it was in The Simpsons Game.
That song was the second track on the band's 1984 album, Love at First Sting. Great name, by the way. If you listen beyond Rock You Like a Hurricane, all the way to the record's close, you'll discover another song that might actually be even better.
Still Loving You is as classic a power ballad as you can get. The song starts out slow and soft, with lead singer Klaus Meine gently crooning about a lost romance. Then, about halfway through, everything changes.
The song suddenly erupts, bursting with all the energy it was trying to keep in. Everything gets louder; the singing; the guitars; the drums; all of it gets turned up to 11 as the protagonist's feelings of loss intensify. It's so big and overblown that it actually cycles right past cheesy and back round to being genuinely awesome again. A truly gigantic way to end a rock record.