The 1970s is the most argumentative decade in the game. No other category contains so many movements that actively disliked one another, and the genre spread here is the widest of any decade in the list.
Look at what is in this category. Progressive rock, with its twenty-minute suites and its conservatoire ambitions. Punk, which existed largely to say that progressive rock was an embarrassment. Disco, which had no interest in the argument and outsold both. Funk, glam, singer-songwriters, heavy metal in its first properly formed shape, and reggae arriving as an international force. All of it happening simultaneously, all of it convinced it was the future.
Rock is still the biggest single genre here, but that word is doing an enormous amount of work. It covers stadium acts and bar bands, Californian harmony groups and English blues revivalists. The decade took the relatively unified thing rock had been in the sixties and shattered it into subcultures that each had their own venues, press, clothes and rules.
The neat version of the story has punk arriving in 1976 as a purifying fire that swept away everything bloated before it. That is a good story and mostly a myth. What actually happened is that punk arrived, changed the conversation permanently, and then largely failed to sell records at anything like the volume of the acts it was rebelling against. The bands it inspired had far more commercial impact than the originals did.
Disco went through something similar in reverse. It was enormously successful, culturally significant, and then subjected to an organised backlash whose ugliness has aged considerably worse than the music. Plenty of the acts filed under disco in this list were making records of real craft and remarkable musicianship.
Underneath all the tribalism, the seventies was when studio production became an art form with recognised practitioners. Multitrack recording matured, mixing desks got bigger, and records started to sound engineered in a way that was audible and intentional. It is why so much seventies music still sounds enormous, and why the decade rewards good headphones more than almost any other.
If you play one decade in this game, this is the one I would pick. It has the widest spread of names, the biggest variety of shapes on the board, and the best chance of the answer being something you had not thought about in twenty years.
The 1970s category in Alphabetish contains 100 acts. The genres best represented are Rock (29), Soul (9), Disco (8), Punk (8), Prog Rock (7). 79 of the 100 names contain more than one word, and the average puzzle in this decade puts 11 letters on the board.
The shortest name in this category is Yes, which gives you just 3 tiles to work with. Short is not easy. Fewer letters means fewer distinctive ones, and there are only so many ways to read a small pile of common characters.
The longest is Crosby Stills Nash and Young at 24 letters. Long boards look far worse than they are, because a name that size nearly always hides a short connecting word you can pull out and set aside.
21 of these acts carry a Q, X, Z or J somewhere in the name, which is 21 percent of the category. If one of those turns up on your board, you have narrowed the field enormously before you have decoded anything else. Start there.
Watch for the long multi-word names in this decade. A board with twenty or more letters looks terrifying but is usually kinder than a short one, because that many letters almost always contains an AND or a THE you can extract and set aside.
Play this decade. The 1970s category runs its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak, separate from every other category. Start playing the 1970s.
Spoiler notice: this is the complete list of every act that can appear in the 1970s puzzle. If you would rather work them out for yourself, stop here.
Think something is missing? Suggestions are welcome via the contact page. The only firm rule is that acts with digits in their names cannot be included, because the numbers do not survive the alphabetising step and the puzzle becomes unsolvable.