1984 (Van Halen album)
1984 studio album by Van Halen
1984 (stylized in Roman numerals as MCMLXXXIV) is the sixth studio album by American rock band Van Halen, released on January 9, 1984, by Warner Bros. Records. It was the last Van Halen studio album to feature lead singer David Lee Roth until A Different Kind of Truth (2012), following his departure from the band in 1985 due to creative differences. 1984 and the band's self-titled debut album are their best-selling records, each having sold more than 10 million copies in the United States.
1984 was well received by music critics. Rolling Stone ranked the album number 81 on its list of the "100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s". It reached number two on the Billboard 200 and remained there for five weeks, kept from the top spot by Michael Jackson's Thriller, on which guitarist Eddie Van Halen made a guest performance. 1984 produced four singles, including "Jump", Van Halen's only number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100; the top-20 hits "Panama" and "I'll Wait"; and the MTV favorite "Hot for Teacher". The album was certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 1999 for ten million shipped copies in the U.S.
Background and recording
Following the tour in support of their fourth studio album, Fair Warning, the band initially wanted to take a break. They released a single, "(Oh) Pretty Woman"/"Happy Trails", intended as a stand-alone release.
The public source identifies “1984 (Van Halen album)” as 1984 studio album by Van Halen. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Halen, album and studio.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q208429. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 2012, 1985 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “1984 (Van Halen album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.