Black Flag

Damaged (1981)

Damaged is the sound of hardcore arriving at full, controlled fury: Greg Ginn's guitar lurches between sludge and jagged dissonance while Henry Rollins, in his first album with the band, sounds like he's barely containing something much larger than the song. "Rise Above" turns defiance into a genuine anthem, its gang-vocal chorus built for rooms that were about to erupt. "TV Party" proves the band could be viciously funny without losing any of its edge. Decades on, it still sounds like a documented act of aggression rather than a period piece.

Sleeve notes

Damaged · 1981

Black Flag formed in Hermosa Beach, California in 1976, built around guitarist Greg Ginn's relentless work ethic and a revolving cast of vocalists — Keith Morris, Ron Reyes, Dez Cadena, and finally Henry Rollins, who joined in 1981 after approaching the band as a fan. Ginn's label, SST Records, became the connective tissue for much of the American underground that followed, and Black Flag's willingness to tour anywhere, constantly, on almost no money, set the template for DIY hardcore's entire operating model.

Damaged (1981), Rollins's first album with the band, remains the clearest statement of Black Flag's fury and control: Ginn's guitar careens between sludge and jagged dissonance while Rollins's vocals carry a controlled desperation that few hardcore singers matched. The band's later records grew stranger and slower, incorporating Black Sabbath-indebted riffing and extended jams that alienated some of the original hardcore audience even as they expanded what the genre could sound like. Ginn's insistence on treating the band as an ongoing experiment rather than a fixed sound made Black Flag as influential for its restlessness as for any single record.