This Heat: This Heat [SUPERIOR VIADUCT]

Why you'll love it

This Superior Viaduct reissue brings back the album first issued on the Piano label. NME put it at No. 35 on its albums of 1979 list, and Pitchfork later named "24 Track Loop" among the 500 greatest songs from punk to the present.

This edition

• Stereo mix

About the album

Most bands of the late 1970s rehearsed somewhere warm. This Heat worked out of a Brixton studio called Cold Storage, and the name does a fair bit of the describing.

Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams swapped instruments freely and treated tape as a fourth member, recording between 1976 and 1978 at Cold Storage and The Workhouse on Old Kent Road with David Cunningham and Anthony Moore. "Test Card" bookends the record, "Not Waving" stretches past seven minutes, "Twilight Furniture" and "Diet Of Worms" pile up loops and clatter, and "The Fall Of Saigon" builds to the album's darkest stretch. BBC Music called it one of the strongest and strangest debut records of all time.

Its fingerprints are all over post-rock, and AllMusic counts it among the records that shaped avant rock. It also starts and ends with a test card, which is more structure than most of us manage in an evening.

Also at Kops: more This Heat on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Superior Viaduct (cat# SV219), a reissue of the 1979 album.