The Prodigy: Music for the Jilted Generation (2LP) [XL RECORDINGS]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set comes in a gatefold jacket, room enough for Les Edwards' famous inside painting. The album went to No. 1 in the UK, went double platinum there and was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Gatefold jacket
• Pressed in the Czech Republic

About the album

By 1994 the British rave scene had gone mainstream and new laws were taking aim at it, so Liam Howlett answered with an album that sounds like a warehouse party refusing to end. Written at his Earthbound Studios, Music for the Jilted Generation pushed breakbeat, techno and hardcore into something heavier and far more cinematic than the Prodigy's debut.

"Voodoo People" rides a guitar riff based on a Nirvana song, played by Lance Riddler, "Poison" features Maxim on vocals over a crushing breakbeat, and "No Good (Start the Dance)" became a club anthem. Members of Pop Will Eat Itself, including Clint Mansell, join in on "Their Law," "Full Throttle" flips a backwards sample, and the closing three-part suite of "3 Kilos," "Skylined" and "Claustrophobic Sting" takes the record somewhere darker.

NME ranked it the ninth-best album of 1994, Spin placed it among the best albums of the 1990s, and David Bowie named it one of his favourite records of the decade. Howlett later admitted he never cared much for the title, which, given everything else on here, is a remarkably mild complaint.

Also at Kops: more The Prodigy on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On XL Recordings (cat# XLLP 114), a reissue of the 1994 album.