Forty years on and the seismic shift that was 5150 – Van Halen’s first album with Sammy Hagar replacing David Lee Roth and also my first introduction to the band still detonates with a force that few records in the hard rock canon can match.
The 2026 expanded edition, remastered directly from the original master tapes and overseen by the band’s longtime engineer Donn Landee, doesn’t seek to reinvent one of the most commercially dominant albums of 1986, but seeks to honour it, warts and all, and in doing so reveals just how staggeringly alive this record remains.
What the expanded edition offers beyond an outstanding remaster is a genuinely comprehensive document of the album and its era. CD2 gathers the singles campaign in full – edited versions…

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