I’ll admit: in the several years I’ve owned and loved it, I never realized that Out of the Blue was not ELO’s most acclaimed record. Longest, most ambitious, and most impressive, undoubtedly. But best? This is a question I never knew I had to ask before, but A New World Record, their breakthrough, is bringing that to the forefront.

It’s tighter than Out of the Blue, to be sure, but at half the length, it kind of has to be. It’s also more playful. The Orchestra takes turns into disco, twists the blues archetype, interjects some opera, and throws synthesizers at calypso, all the while creating some of the most sophisticated pop tunes in music history (Living Thing, Tightrope). If this was most people’s introduction to ELO, what an introduction it must have been.