The 1980s is the decade where the machines arrived. Synth-Pop is the second-largest genre in this category, which would have been unthinkable ten years earlier, and it happened because the tools got cheap.
The technical change underneath eighties pop is easy to state and hard to overstate. Affordable polyphonic synthesisers and programmable drum machines meant that two people in a bedroom could produce something that sounded finished. You no longer needed a drummer, a rehearsal room, or four people who could stand each other. An enormous number of acts in this category exist because of that, and they sound like nothing that came before because the instruments themselves were new.
The other change was visual. A song was now expected to come with pictures, and the video was not an afterthought but a significant part of the budget and the strategy. This rewarded acts who understood image, styling and choreography, and it punished ones who did not. Several careers in this list were made almost entirely by looking extraordinary on a small screen.
For all that, Rock remains the biggest genre here, and Metal has a substantial presence too. The eighties were a commercial peak for guitar music even as synthesisers dominated the conversation. Stadium rock got bigger, more polished and more successful than ever. Metal split into a mainstream branch that sold millions and an underground branch that treated the mainstream branch with open contempt, a pattern the genre has repeated ever since.
Meanwhile a genuine alternative circuit was forming underneath all of it, built on independent labels, college radio and touring. It sold modestly through the eighties and then, at the start of the nineties, ate the mainstream whole.
The most consequential thing in this category is also one of the smallest. Hip-Hop appears here in real numbers for the first time. In commercial terms it was still a minority interest for most of the decade. In historical terms it is the beginning of the form that would dominate popular music for the next thirty years, and the acts in this list are the ones who established that it could be recorded, sold and taken seriously.
Play this decade and you get an unusually wide swing between the synthetic and the very loud. It is one of the more recognisable categories in the game, which makes it a reasonable place to start if you are building a streak.
The 1980s category in Alphabetish contains 101 acts. The genres best represented are Rock (22), Pop (17), Synth-Pop (17), Metal (10), Pop Rock (9). 78 of the 101 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 Wham, which gives you just 4 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 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark at 29 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.
16 of these acts carry a Q, X, Z or J somewhere in the name, which is 16 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.
Eighties acts loved a stylised, invented name, which cuts both ways. You get more unusual letters to work with than in earlier decades, but fewer ordinary words to guess your way towards. Trust the odd letters.
Play this decade. The 1980s category runs its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak, separate from every other category. Start playing the 1980s.
Spoiler notice: this is the complete list of every act that can appear in the 1980s 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.