Against Me!: Transgender Dysphoria Blues (with download card) [TOTAL TREBLE]

Why you'll love it

This Total Treble pressing plays at 45 RPM and comes in a gatefold jacket with lyrics and a download card. The album debuted at No. 23 on the Billboard 200, the band's highest debut, and earned a Metacritic score of 82.

This edition

• Cut at 45 RPM
• Gatefold jacket with lyrics
• Download card included
• Stereo mix

About the album

Plenty of punk records are about finding out who you are. This one was written by someone who already knew and was done keeping quiet about it. Laura Jane Grace came out as transgender in 2012, and the songs she wrote around it turned Against Me! into the sharpest, most direct band of their career. It came out on the band's own Total Treble label, with Xtra Mile in the UK.

Grace wrote every song and produced it herself, and the band started over more than once before finishing at Dave Grohl's Studio 606 in 2013, with Atom Willard on drums, James Bowman on guitar and Fat Mike of NOFX dropping in on bass. The title track and "True Trans Soul Rebel" hit like a clenched fist, "Unconditional Love" and "Black Me Out" are huge singalongs, and the acoustic "Two Coffins" is as tender as punk gets.

Now Magazine heard "career-defining clarity," and Loudwire later ranked it among the best rock albums of the decade. At 45 RPM it's also the fastest way to get through ten songs about change, which seems fitting.

Also at Kops: more Against Me! on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Total Treble (cat# TM003), the 2014 album.