Violent Femmes: Violent Femmes [CRAFT]

Why you'll love it

Craft Recordings remastered this edition and pressed it on 180g vinyl at Memphis Record Pressing. The debut is the band's biggest seller, certified platinum, and home to "Blister In The Sun" and "Add It Up."

This edition

• Remastered
• 180g vinyl

About the album

Busking is usually a good way to collect loose change. Violent Femmes collected a career: on August 23, 1981, they were playing on the street outside Milwaukee's Oriental Theatre when James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders spotted them, and Chrissie Hynde invited them to play a short acoustic set that night.

Gordon Gano, Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo cut the album in July 1982 at Castle Recording Company in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, with Mark Van Hecke producing. It's acoustic guitar, bass and a snare drum played like it owes them money, and it's thrilling: "Blister In The Sun" and "Kiss Off" are nervy anthems, "Please Do Not Go" pleads, "Add It Up" builds and explodes, and "Gone Daddy Gone" swings.

It became a cornerstone of folk punk and a rite of passage for teenagers with cheap guitars. Their parents learned every word too, whether they wanted to or not.

Also at Kops: more Violent Femmes on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Craft Recordings (cat# CR00108), a reissue of the 1983 album.