The biggest decade in the game, and the birthplace of the one word album title.
The 1970s is the largest section of Cryptune, and that is not an accident of taste. It is the decade when the most different things were happening at once. Progressive rock, glam, punk, disco, reggae, singer-songwriter confessionals, heavy metal and country crossover all had commercially serious years inside the same ten years, and most of them left titles behind that are still recognisable half a century later.
It is also the decade that invented a particular kind of album title: the single abstract noun. Tapestry. Rumours. Aftermath. Horses. A one-word title is a confident thing to put on a record, because it tells the buyer almost nothing and trusts them to care anyway. The seventies produced them in volume, and Cryptune has a correspondingly large number of one-tile puzzles from this decade.
Set against that, the same decade produced some of the longest titles in the game. Bridge Over Troubled Water is a full metaphor in five words. This split personality, half single nouns and half sprawling phrases, is why the seventies feels so varied to play through even though it is one section.
Punk deserves a specific mention, because it changed what a title could sound like. The Ramones named a record Rocket to Russia, which is a joke, a threat and a piece of nonsense at the same time, and that register simply did not exist in mainstream popular music ten years earlier.
The heavyweights of the decade are exactly who you would expect, and they appear here repeatedly for the same reason they appear everywhere: David Bowie changed titles as often as he changed everything else, Pink Floyd wrote phrases that work as free-standing English, and Led Zeppelin had a gift for four-word declarations.
The 1970s accounts for 91 puzzles in Cryptune, split 52 songs to 39 albums. The average puzzle from this decade has 2.4 tiles, and 21 of them are single tile puzzles, meaning the whole answer is one word.
The longest answer from the decade is Bridge Over Troubled Water, at 4 words. The most common clue types across those puzzles are synonym with 143, direct with 40 and opposites with 26.
The acts appearing most often from this decade are David Bowie (8), Pink Floyd (7), Led Zeppelin (6), Queen (5) and The Bee Gees (4).
A single tile in a seventies puzzle is very often an album, and very often a proper noun or an abstract noun with no obvious relationship to music. When you see one tile and the label says Album, stop looking for a phrase and start looking for a single strong word.
This decade rewards knowing artists rather than songs. A large share of the seventies answers here are album titles, and albums are remembered by who made them in a way that individual songs are not. If a clue gives you one word and you cannot place it, try running it past the major seventies acts rather than trying to recall a specific track.
Watch for titles that are grammatically incomplete. Comfortably Numb is two words that do not form a sentence, and a solver looking for a subject and a verb will waste time. The seventies is where titles start being fragments, which is a habit that only intensifies later.
The 91 puzzles from this decade cover 88 different titles, listed alphabetically with the act responsible. A handful appear twice in the game, once as a song and once as an album, and are listed once here. Puzzle dates are not shown, so this tells you what is in the game without telling you what is coming tomorrow.
Want to know how the clues themselves are built? The clue school takes each clue type in turn. Or go back to all decades.