Misfits: Static Age [ASTRALWERKS/CAPITOL]

Why you'll love it

This Caroline reissue comes with a printed inner sleeve carrying the lyrics. Static Age is the first album the Misfits ever recorded, the raw blueprint for horror punk, and Metallica later covered its "Last Caress."

This edition

• Printed inner sleeve
• Lyrics included
• Stereo mix

About the album

Static Age came out of thirty hours of studio time, which Glenn Danzig received in exchange for the rights to the name of his Blank Records imprint. In January and February 1978 Danzig and the band's first lineup cut seventeen songs at C.I. Recordings in New York with Dave Achelis, playing live in the room with a handful of takes and hardly any overdubs.

Four of the songs surfaced that summer on the "Bullet" single on Danzig's new Plan 9 label, and the rest waited while the band moved toward their B-movie horror look. "Hybrid Moments," "Some Kinda Hate," "Attitude" and "Teenagers From Mars" are short, sharp punk songs with big pop hooks, and "TV Casualty" and "Return Of The Fly" already lean into the monster-movie imagery that made them famous. "We Are 138" later turned up live on the Evilive EP.

Danzig reworked several of these tracks for the Legacy of Brutality compilation in 1985 before the original tapes finally got their moment. The album spent eighteen years on a shelf before the world heard it whole; we've made sure it doesn't do that here.

Also at Kops: more Misfits on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Caroline Records (cat# 675201), a reissue of the 1996 album.