They are the ne plus ultra…the new hall of famers…der keine größte aller zeiten, aka the GOAT. Electronic music as it exists today, as it’s existed for nearly half a century now, doesn’t know many pathways outside of the ones laid down by Kraftwerk.

“Autobahn,” the landmark track that opens their fourth album, sonically drops the listener inside that cramped Volkswagen the band can be seen in on the record sleeve. It’s an audio trip
down Germany’s mythic highway, complete with car horns, a vocoded chauffeur and a simple Minimoog bass line they ran through a delay unit to simulate the rhythm of the road.

Famously reticent to talk about their process (or to talk at all…), their Model D must have been an early unit, since you can see it being played live by Ralf Hutter during an 1973 performance on German TV. The Autobahn album, which included a 22-minute version of the title track, was recorded in their private Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf and at the Cologne farmhouse of legendary engineer/producer Conny Plank. But the edited version of “Autobahn” landed them, for the first and only time, inside the American Top 40.

When the classic four-man lineup of the band appeared on the beloved U.K. science program Tomorrow’s World in 1975, the narrator talked about how Kraftwerk made “machine music.” Nonsense. That same year Hutter would tell Sounds magazine:

“When you play electronic music, you deal with noises, and gradually you become more aware of the world of sounds. We want to communicate our awareness, so that when you leave our concert and maybe walk down a street, you can still hear concerts by listening to the noise of the traffic, the footsteps of other people...”