The Man-Machine

Recorded at Kling Klang Studio and mixed at Studio Rudas in Düsseldorf, where the band hired Leanard Jackson, a sound engineer from Detroit, to work with Joschko Rudas on the final mix. It was the first Kraftwerk album on which Bartos was co-credited as a songwriter. The cover was credited to Karl Klefisch and inspired by the Russian artist El Lissitzky, whose About Two Squares supplied the back cover graphic. Günther Fröhling photographed the four members in red shirts and black ties. The album takes in the Cold War, Germany's fascination with manufacturing and the relationship between people and machines. Pitchfork's Tom Ewing said its science fiction comes from the 1920s and 1930s, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the earliest ideas of robots.

In 1978 Andy Gill of NME wrote that it stood as one of the pinnacles of 70s rock music, and Rolling Stone found it chilling in its restraint yet strangely pleasant in an otherworldly way. The album first reached number 53 in Britain. After The Model became a number one single in early 1982 it rose to number nine, the band's second highest UK album after Autobahn, and the BPI certified it gold on 15 February 1982. Pitchfork placed it 92nd among the albums of the 1970s in 2004, and in 2013 NME ranked it 57th greatest album of all time, calling it Kraftwerk's definitive album. After its release Kraftwerk did not release another album or tour for three years.