Love at First Sting
1984 studio album by Scorpions

Love at First Sting is the ninth studio album by German hard rock/heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in February 1984 by Mercury Records in the US and in March 1984 by Harvest Records in the UK. The album contains "Rock You Like a Hurricane", "Still Loving You", and "Big City Nights", three of the band's most famous songs.
Music
The album's music has been described as heavy metal, hard rock, and glam metal.
Background and recording
The album was recorded at Dierks Studios in Stommeln, West Germany. Initial sessions took place in Stockholm's Polar Studios in the Summer of 1983 with ex-Rainbow members Jimmy Bain on bass and Bobby Rondinelli on drums, but nothing made it to the final album.
It became the group's most successful album in the US, where it peaked at number 6 on the Billboard 200 chart in 1984, and went double-platinum by the end of the year, reaching triple-platinum status in 1995. The song "Rock You Like a Hurricane" reached number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the same year; "Still Loving You" reached number 64 on the same chart, number 14 in Germany, and number 3 in the French and Swiss single charts.
Artwork
The original cover art was created by Kochlowski, which is a German graphic design company, and features a photo shot by renowned German photographer Helmut Newton. Despite the record company having shown the original cover art to retailers without any concerns, a complaint by Walmart in the US after the album was released resulted in PolyGram Records issuing a "clean" cover for use in several department store chains. The alternative cover was designed to be less controversial by simply showing a photo of the band members, which was the same photo as the one on the inner sleeve.
The public source identifies “Love at First Sting” as 1984 studio album by Scorpions. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Love, First and Sting.
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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 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q161194. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1983 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Love at First Sting” 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.