Best ’80s Album Vote Roundtable

With less than twelve hours remaining in their Best ’80s Album March Madness battle, Guns N’ Roses and Van Halen are locked in an incredibly close race.

After nearly 10,000 reader ballots have been cast, just 61 votes separate 1984 and Appetite for Destruction.

So we asked four of our writers to weigh in on which album gets their support in this race, before giving you one last chance to register your own vote below.

You can vote once per hour now through tonight, April 3 at 11:59PM ET. The winner goes on to the finals, where they will compete against either AC/DC‘s Back in Black or U2‘s The Joshua Tree.

Bryan Rolli: I love both of these albums to death, but Appetite for Destruction is the only one tattooed on my body. To roar out of the gate with such a paradigm-shifting album is one of the rarest feats in music (one that Van Halen also achieved with their 1978 debut). After nearly a decade of increasingly bloated and contrived glam metal dominating the Sunset Strip, Guns N’ Roses made rock ‘n’ roll sound dangerous again with Appetite. Their hybrid of blues-rock, punk, glam and a tinge of metal sounded raw, unrepentantly depraved and impossibly catchy. The album is a primer in hard rock guitar playing and economical hook writing. Axl Rose’s shapeshifting vocals are nothing short of revelatory: He sounds like a twisted beggar, a thuggish street brawler, a decadent party host and a lovesick poet all at once. For my money, Appetite for Destruction is a perfect album with a perfect title. Guns N’ Roses sound hungry and fearless in a way that can’t be faked or replicated, resulting in a lightning-in-a-bottle moment that defined their career and the decade.

Michael Gallucci: Appetite for Destruction – While 1984 opened a few new doors for, specifically, Van Halen, Appetite for Destruction shifted the way, generally, hard-rock records sounded by the end of the decade. 1984 today sounds very much a product of its time; Appetite, though, can still be heard in any number of modern records.

Matt Wardlaw: Appetite for Destruction. An album that bridged punk, hard rock and hair metal, with the kind of danger you don’t see in rock ‘n’ roll albums anymore. “Out Ta Get Me,” for example, sounds like nothing GNR ever did since, and it has an edge built into it. Appetite is also the band’s most cohesive record — the one where they were all on the same page about where their music should go, and weren’t trying too hard to be artistic and theatrical.

At the same time, the record was diverse, with the snarling metal edge of “Welcome to the Jungle” and the pretty melodic core of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” showing off GNR’s range. Axl and Slash especially were so locked in on this album, really carrying on the Toxic Twins legacy of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. While I appreciate Van Halen’s 1984, I think Appetite is the better record.

Matthew Wilkening: Even though these albums came out just three years apart, and during the middle third of the decade, they feel like the bookends of the ’80s hard rock story. Although they were operating at a higher level than the bands they influenced, the keyboards of the chart-topping “Jump” and the humorous hit videos of Van Halen’s 1984 kicked open the door to fame for Motley Crue‘s “Home Sweet Home” and a massive wave of other hair metal bands.

Although they weren’t above using some of the trappings of the genre at first, Guns N’ Roses brought a sense of authenticity and danger back to rock with Appetite for Destruction, rendering much of hair metal’s pomp and excess instantly uncool years before Nirvana’s Nevermind and grunge arrived to finish the job.

But while Appetite for Destruction may have had the bigger impact on rock history as a whole, 1984 had the bigger impact on the ’80s, which is the decade in question here.