On 15 June 1981, Duran Duran released their self-titled debut studio album featuring singles "Planet Earth" "Careless Memories" and "Girls on Film".
Twenty years after its release, Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols said: "If you go back to the first record, they smoked everybody. It's incredible! Disco bass-lines, Japan textures and mixed by the guy who did the Iggy Pop records". For AllMusic, Eduardo Rivadavia argued the album "artfully coalesced the sonic and stylistic elements of the burgeoning new romantic movement they were soon to spearhead". He called the band's choice of singles "ultra-smart" and, combined with their "groundbreaking" music videos, Duran Duran secured them as frontrunners of the MTV generation – "cementing their status as one of the decade's most successful pop music icons". Zaleski described the album as modern "art-school unorthodoxy meets pop futurism", and the work of a "glamorous and modern young band". In a 2021 article discussing the band's then-recent Future Past record, Rolling Stone called their debut album a "classic" that introduced "a radical new style of art-glam punk-disco swagger".