Madonna (Japanese Pressing)

Very smart clean Japanese pressed album and a nice crisp cover with OBI strip. Includes  lyric sheet.

Madonna is the eponymous debut studio album by American singer and songwriter Madonna, released on July 27, 1983 by Sire Records. It was renamed Madonna: The First Album for the 1985 international re-release of the album. In 1982, while establishing herself as a singer in Downtown New York, Madonna met Seymour Stein, president of Sire Records, who signed her after listening to her single "Everybody". The success of the single prompted Sire to sign her for an album's deal. Reggie Lucas was chosen as the primary producer, while Madonna solely wrote five of eight tracks on the album. However, she was not happy with the completed tracks and disagreed with Lucas's production techniques. She then invited John "Jellybean" Benitez to help her finish the album. Benitez remixed many of the tracks and produced "Holiday".

The overall sound of Madonna is dissonant, and is in the form of upbeat synthetic disco, utilizing some of the new technology of the time, like the usage of Linn drum machine, Moog bass and the Oberheim OB-X synthesizer. The songs on the album are sung by Madonna in a bright, girlish vocal timbre, and lyrically talks about love and relationships. To promote the album, Madonna performed in various one-off gigs in clubs and television programs in the United States and United Kingdom throughout 1983–84. The album was later promoted during The Virgin Tour in 1985. Five singles were released from the album, including the international top-ten hits "Holiday", "Lucky Star" and "Borderline". The music videos of the album's singles were released on a video compilation titled Madonna, which became the best-selling videocassette of 1985 in the United States.

Contemporary critics have applauded the album, but Madonna was dismissed by some critics when it was released in 1983. In 2008, the album was ranked at number five on Entertainment Weekly's list of "Top 100 Best Albums of Past 25 Years." The album peaked at number eight on the Billboard 200, and was certified five-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipment of five million copies across the United States. It also reached the top ten of the charts in Australia, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom, while selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. Critics retrospectively noted that the album helped popularize dance music in mainstream recording industry. It pointed the direction for numerous female artists of the 1980s and set the standard for dance-pop for decades afterward.