Ace of Spades (Motörhead album)
1980 studio album by Motörhead
Ace of Spades is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Motörhead, released in October 1980 via Bronze Records. It is the band's most commercially successful album, peaking at number four on the UK Albums Chart and reaching gold status in the UK by March 1981. It was preceded by the release of the title track as a single in October, which peaked at number 15 on the UK Singles Chart inearly November.
It was the band's debut release in the United States, with Mercury Records handling distribution in North America. In 2020, the album was ranked at 408 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.
Background
By 1979, Motörhead had released two successful albums, Overkill and Bomber, and had gained a loyal fan following by constant touring and television appearances. Their ferocious, loud proto-thrash playing style appealed equally to punks and heavy metal fans, but in 1979 Sounds writer Geoff Barton coined the term "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" (NWOBHM) to classify a slew of newer bands such as Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, and Saxon. Motörhead – a band that resented being labelled anything other than rock 'n' roll – was placed in this new genre, which would go on to influence the emerging thrash metal movement that would include bands like Metallica and Megadeth. In the 2011 book Overkill: The Untold Story of Motörhead, Joel McIver quotes vocalist and bassist Lemmy:
I like Iron Maiden and Saxon out of the new mob, and that's about it, really... We were too late for the first metal movement and early for the next one...
The public source identifies “Ace of Spades (Motörhead album)” as 1980 studio album by Motörhead. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Spades, Motörhead and album.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q481752. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1981, 2020 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ace of Spades (Motörhead 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.