Although our debut issue was published in July 1980, the following year remains remarkable in the annals of Guitar World, as it was the magazine's first full year of publication.
And it's a pretty good thing we were around; it was a banner year for rock music and the electric guitar. Disco was dead. Country hadn't gone pop yet. And alternative? Still 10 years away from being mainstream.
Yes, rock was in full reign in 1981. Of course, there were some great jazz and blues releases -- Jaco Pastorius' Word of Mouth and B.B. King's There Must Be A Better World Somewhere, for example.
But take a look at even a handful of the albums featured in the photo gallery below -- classics like Van Halen's Fair Warning, Rush's Moving Pictures, Ozzy Osbourne's Diary of a Madman and Iron Maiden's Killers -- and there's no denying it was a good time to be a hard rock fanatic.
For more great albums celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, check out the gallery below. And for more anniversaries, check out our galleries of classic albums from 1971 and 1991.
And don't forget to let us if we left your favorite off the list.
“The king of modern blues getting down and dirty (musically) with a former Van Halen singer”: January 2025 Guitar World Editors’ Picks
“I thought that it was a crime that these songs were sitting there on the shelf”: In the 1970s, Hayley Williams’ grandfather made an album that nobody heard. Now it’s finally being released through her Paramore bandmate’s label
