Solid State Survivor

YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA

1979

3.27

Rating

Votes

23%

32%

34%

10%

Distribution

Genres: Electronica Styles: Electro, Synth Pop

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Album Summary

Solid State Survivor is the second album by Japanese electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra, released in 1979. Later, Solid State Survivor was released in 1982 in the UK on LP and cassette, also in 1992 in the United States on CD, but many of the songs from this album were compiled for release in the US as the US pressing of ×∞Multiplies (1980), including the tracks "Behind the Mask", "Rydeen", "Day Tripper", and "Technopolis". Solid State Survivor is only one of a handful of YMO albums in which the track titles do not have a Japanese equivalent. The album was an early example of synth-pop, a genre that the band helped pioneer alongside their earlier album Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978), and it also contributed to the development of techno. Solid State Survivor won the Best Album Award at the 22nd Japan Record Awards, and it sold two million records. In 2020, Jonathan McNamara of The Japan Times listed it as one of the 10 Japanese albums worthy of inclusion on Rolling Stone's 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Additionally, the album has been referred to as "one of the godfathers of techno music," according to Matt Mitchell of Paste Magazine.

Reviews

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Rating: All 5★ 4★ 3★ 2★ 1★

Length: All Short Long

May 09 2026 Author

Yes, I will take some Japanese disco flavored Kraftwerk. Thank you very much.

May 10 2026 Author

Vaguely retro cute, but too much like the soundtrack of Pong in the end. The Beatles cover was neither inspired nor a very good idea.

May 11 2026 Author

Rubbish, although the cover version is surprising enough and weird enough to scrape a second star - but only just

May 09 2026 Author

What a great suggestion! Had that 70s/80s electronic arcade music feel at times done really well. I loved it!

May 09 2026 Author

A timeless album, at least for me. A great sound and its influence on a band like Japan is immediate.

May 28 2026 Author

Yeah weird Japanese electronic music from the 70s? Yes. Yes please. An absolute bizarre cover of Day Tripper too. My personal rating: 5/5 My rating relative to the list: 5/5 Should this have been included on the original list? Yes.

May 09 2026 Author

Like Japanese Kraftwerk if they were fun

May 09 2026 Author

This was a charming little surprise of an album. I like the old-timey sound of the synthesizers.

May 11 2026 Author

Rarely does an album make me physically grin, but this was such a fun and joyous listen I couldn’t help myself. The vibrant, plucky synths trace out such fun melodic lines, and the warm, soft pads invoke a perfect sense of nostalgia without making this LP sound dated. Not every track justifies its runtime, but the overall experience is still incredibly cohesive and fun. Feels like the 1001 has been lacking in Japanese and electronica contributions, so this was a stellar add to deftly address both deficits.

May 11 2026 Author

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: Technopolis, Rydeen

May 12 2026 Author

Solid State Survivor is an early synth-pop album by Yellow Magic Orchestra. One of the band members is electronic and Japanese pop/rock legend Ryuichi Sakamoto (Soundtrack of The Last Emperor and several other films). This album contains the classic "Behind the Mask" song. The music sometimes sound somewhat outdated now, but it's from 1978. So I won't complain. The beeps often remind me of a (16bit) video game in progress. Funny how the music sounds very Japanese in the melodies (like an soundtrack for a 1980/1990s cartoon series).

May 12 2026 Author

Good fun electro album, enjoyed this.

May 15 2026 Author

YMO definitely deserved a spot on the main list. Massively influential on everything from synthpop and techno to hip-hop and video game soundtracks. Pretty much every early Japanese video game composer was directly influenced by these dudes, so if you listen to this and think: "Hey this sounds like Mario", that's probably why. Lots of fun. Loses some steam by the end, but that first three track run and "Behind the Mask" are unmatched.

May 15 2026 Author

Good, but I would've preferred their other 1979 album.

May 15 2026 Author

Loved it

May 20 2026 Author

Whoa, Japanese Kraftwerk! These guys are fun

May 20 2026 Author

Bra grejer det här. Har nog ägt skivan en gång i tiden. Nu har jag nog bara några låtar på min Spotifylista. Inte högsta betyg men ytterst nära. Cred till den som nominerade denna.

May 26 2026 Author

This starts out being enormously fun. Unfortunately I think it ends really badly. The daytripper cover is atrocious and the general feeling of the last half if the album is tedium. Fortunately, it's only a half hour or so in total. Makes me think they should maybe have stuck with an EP.

May 30 2026 Author

4.5

May 09 2026 Author

Good

May 09 2026 Author

Not normally something I would listen to, but I dug it. 3 stars.

May 10 2026 Author

Different from what I expected

May 12 2026 Author

All right, I guess. Some of this was very funky, which was appreciated, but a lot of it felt to me like pretty lightweight synth noodling and general bleep bloop. I do get that it's very early in this scene, and merits grace on that basis. Trailing nearly a decade after Kraftwerk though, of which I found it strongly reminiscent. I want to stress that I did not at all dislike this.

May 12 2026 Author

Electronic, synth-pop. Ni fu ni fa.

May 15 2026 Author

This is a quite a short and, sadly, forgettable little album. It’s sort of interesting what they’re doing and maybe if I had never heard anything from the eighties onward, I would be more impressed, but along with the context of modern music, this falls flat. It wasn’t offensive. It’s cute, which is not a word I believe I’ve ever used to describe an album. I’m glad to have listened, though I don’t think I’m the target audience. 3/5

May 18 2026 Author

I wouldn't have pegged Solid State Survivor as being nearly 50 years old, that's pretty cool, and it's a quirky little album that mostly sounds like video game soundtracks, except again this would've predated almost all of them so perhaps they were pretty influential. It gets a bit tiresome here and there but it's only half an hour, I liked Absolute Ego Dance most, all of my foibles seem to have some mitigations so it's probably slap bang in the middle of the scale and I'll decide whether that rounds up or down later.

May 19 2026 Author

Electronic, synth-pop. Ni fu ni fa.

May 22 2026 Author

Música electrónica de finales de los 70 con bases muy comerciales, un tanto simplistas y sin mucha complicación. Tiene un aire un tanto "viejuno", aunque puede llegar a resultar agradable de escuchar. Tranquilo, para lograr un buen ambiente.

May 17 2026 Author

The artwork could be from an album released today. On the whole the album wasn’t for me but I did recognise a sample used by the Welsh rap band “Goldie Lookin Chain”, which was nice (“Behind The Mask” was sampled on “Your Mother’s Got A Penis”, if you’re interested)