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Best Punk Album in The World...Ever

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In a 2016 tweet, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong declared war on pop-punk. “I’ve always hated the phrase,” he explained later in Kerrang! “I think it’s a contradiction in terms. Either you’re punk, or you’re not.” It would be sacrilege for Sex Pistols not to appear in the upper region of this list. In fact, some out there will no doubt rebuke me for not having it in first position. Johnny Rotten and the gang weren’t the most talented musicians in the world, nor on this list, for that matter. However, credit must be paid to those who can lift a middle finger to the man and spur cultural upheaval with provocative hits like ‘God Save the Queen’. The greatest punk album of all time was made by a band trying to escape punk. Not its intent, force or even attitude, but its implied restrictions and captivity by fundamentalists. The Clash had gently expanded their scope on their second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope, but on London Calling they blew everything apart: styles, dynamics, vantage point and subject matter. This was the first and purest expression by these San Pedro, California, cultural radicals and it really delivered on punk’s anti-pop promise with a sonic spew that only by the most liberal standards could be called songs. There are no choruses or versus here, just one minute blasts of inspired rage loosely held together by D. Boone's ranting vocals and Mike Watts’ blurting bass. The seven cuts rendered in under seven minutes on this 1980 EP are probably mistakenly credited for inspiring hardcore and are now available on CD as part of the Minuteman compilation, Post-Mersh, Vol. 3 (SST). Joyce Manor’s early years were spent oscillating between frenetic punk and heart-on-sleeve pop. “The first thing we did was pop-punk wanting to be hardcore, and we succeeded,”guitarist-singer Barry Johnson told L.A. Record after his band released their third album, Never Hungover Again. “That gave us the confidence to focus on more pop stuff, which we wouldn’t have had the confidence to do before – to really wanna write actual pop songs, for better or worse.” It was for the better: Never Hungover Again is a titanic punch of yearning, winsome pop-forward tunes delivered in an efficient 19 minutes. Here, Joyce Manor smoothed out the edges of their songs, letting their melodies breathe and clearing room for their hooks to hit the gut. Johnson’s pensive bellows and empathetic lyrics about youthful mistakes (“Heart Tattoo”) and post-adolescent malaise (“Catalina Fight Song”) helped make Never Hungover Againa pop-punk album even people who hated pop-punk could find joy in. L.G.

One of the greatest things about post-punk is the way that it makes intense bleakness danceable despite itself; and Leeds outfit Gang of Four were one of the earliest pioneers with their debut album ‘Entertainment!’. Sarcastic in title and biting by nature, it’s a record that sets out an urgent agenda with thumping drums: spanning from political violence in Northern Ireland to rampant consumerism. And Gang of Four’s politics often veer towards the personal: the likes of ‘5.45’ and ‘Contract’ nail the lingering sense of anxiety and dread that comes with a constant numbing bombardment of terrible news. “ Our bodies make us worry,” frontman Andy Gill sings cheerfully on the latter, atop spiking and uneasy dub-punk. Despair and disenfranchisement colliding with gold-standard pop writing – it doesn’t get much better than this.

Acts like Blondie and The Jam had kept a degree of personality in the music scene; the real draw was Talking Heads. Although they had been born in the embers of punk, they didn’t really fit there. In fact, they didn’t really fit anywhere. That was exactly as David Byrne and the band preferred it, so they pushed forward to make themselves that most desirable of things—unique. It meant Byrne’s lyrics got stranger, his performances more entangled within themselves, and his costuming grew to unimaginable levels. Byrne, to all intents and purposes, made himself irregular on purpose. The album’s centrepiece, the electrifying New Noise, remains one of the most astonishing calls to arms ever committed to record. Eloquent, charismatic frontman Denis Lyxzen’s screams and whoops are as joyful as they are intense, and they echoed down through the generation of new bands that followed them. The moment, half way through the song, when the sound fades, before building to a truly gargantuan chorus of riotous crowd noise and elephantine riffs, makes you feel absolutely invincible. Mis-filed under ‘also-ran punk’ for way too long, Blank Generation deserves reappraisal as a truly outstanding late-70s punk classic.

When Savages emerged in 2011, they came with their own mythology that felt ripped from another time; at early shows Jehnny Beth goaded crowds from inside a wooden cage and the band laid out their creative vision in a succinct manifesto. “If you are focused, you are harder to reach,” read the front of their debut album ‘Silence Yourself’. “If you are distracted, you are available.” And it was an ethos that informed every last note; brutal, industrial, rib-cage juddering post-punk without an ounce of bagginess. Darby Crash was the L.A. scene’s poster boy for the joys of self-annihilation, but then where would punk be without its share of ugly death? On this 1979, Joan Jett-produced album, which is catapulted into greatness by Pat Smear’s raging guitar, the ultimate casualty bawls and brays his way through desperately ravaged tunes like “Manimal” and “We Must Bleed,” making the need for writing a suicide note a year later utterly superfluous. In all essential respects, X’s Los Angeles was not that different from the city Jim Morrison celebrated and damned in his work with the Doors. In fact, the Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, became X’s producer. ‘I thought Exene was the next step after Patti Smith,’ Manzarek told writer Richard Cromelin. ‘She takes it further than any woman has ever taken it.’”Undeniably the best-named band in history, the Dead Kennedys brought politics into American punk on this, their fast and furious debut. Equipped with a vox that claws its way under your skin, Jello Biafra heaped ridicule on the “father knows best” illusions of Reagan's America with an irony and incisiveness that was unfortunately lost on the legions of P.C. punks who followed in his wake. Crass put out some truly great albums, and perhaps there is none greater in their catalogue than Penis Envy, an impassioned, HMV-banned, 30-minute anarcha-feminist rant that took aim at various facets of female oppression, and featured exclusively female vocals in the form of Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre. The album won the band a not-insignificant amount of good, old-fashioned tabloid outrage when they successfully managed to pull off a hoax offering a flexi disc single from the album to be given away free with teeny bopper magazine Loving, drumming them up a shit load of free press in the process. Few bands, punk or otherwise, have ever been so controversial. And, yes, they did split up in 1984. It’s a chance encounter, to be sure: As Jello Biafra joined up with what would become Dead Kennedys in San Francisco, he and his new bandmates discovered he couldn’t play guitar. Instead, he would hum and sing what he thought the music should sound like behind his lyrics, and the players would build compositions from there. The results have punk’s anger, but there’s a particular chug in Klaus Flouride’s bass and twang in East Bay Ray’s guitar that set up rhythmic noise in songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” before crashing down around listeners’ ears come chorus time. Along with Strummer and Jake Burns, it was the moment that Weller became the Poet Laureate of council estate kids everywhere.

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