BLACK FLAG: Loose Nut LP

By 1985, half the world had already written Black Flag's obituary. Greg Ginn didn't care. He was too busy dragging hardcore into a slow, sludgy, heavy-metal-adjacent nightmare that confused the straight-edge kids and thrilled everyone else.

Loose Nut is the sound of a band that had nothing left to prove and chose, perversely, to keep going anyway. It's slower, weirder, and heavier than the Nervous Breakdown era, sitting somewhere between hardcore punk and the proto-doom that would eventually spawn a thousand basement bands. Henry Rollins is doing his best damaged-gym-rat poetry, Ginn is playing guitar like a man arguing with himself, and the whole thing holds together through sheer bloody-mindedness. Essential American punk history, full stop.

Original 1985 pressing on vinyl LP. Genre: Hardcore Punk, Heavy Metal. Country of origin: USA.

Fans of: The Misfits, Hüsker Dü, Flipper, early Rollins Band.