For Fans of Scorpions

Every new Scorpions listener gets handed "Wind of Change" or "Still Loving You" first, and those are fine songs, but they are not the entry point. Blackout (1982) is where you understand what the band actually is: Matthias Jabs and Rudolf Schenker trading riffs with the precision of people who have been doing this since before stadium rock had a name, Klaus Meine's voice fighting through vocal surgery to deliver one of the year's best performances. Start there, then work backwards and forwards.

Savage Amusement (1988) gets overshadowed by the albums on either side of it, which is deeply unfair. Produced by Keith Olsen, it is the record where the band fully absorbed the production values of the decade without surrendering the craft underneath. "Rhythm of Love," "Passion Rules the Game" are not concessions to pop radio. They are evidence that the band could write a melody as well as anyone working in the format.

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's fly-on-the-wall Metallica documentary is nominally about the making of St. Anger, but it is really about what happens to a band after two decades of operating at maximum intensity. The group therapy sessions, the creative impasses, the near-dissolution: all of it makes the finished album feel earned in a way that listening alone never could. Watch it as a companion piece to any long-running band's catalog, including this one.

Def Leppard is the band that most directly inherited the Scorpions formula: enormous hooks, meticulous studio craft, power ballads that do not apologize for wanting to move you. Pyromania and Hysteria are the obvious parallels, but Adrenalize deserves more credit for showing how far you can push polished arena rock before it dissolves into something else entirely. The lineage runs clean.