The Prodigy are credited as simply 'Prodigy'. The Chemical Brothers are credited as simply 'Chemical Brothers'. The concept of the album is similar to the Harmless collections and to BMG Global TV's Blaxplotation album series. Sadly, the band imploded under a cloud of misbehaviour, violence and a sophomore album flop in 1979, and we never got to find out how great they really could have been. The Dead Boys could easily have been one of the bands of their generation. Frontman Stiv Bators should have been punk’s poster boy. But, somewhere along the line, it all went wrong.

Even 40 years later, this is a divisive album. The bottom half of the internet will light up at the merest suggestion of its name. There are still plenty who believe that the Sex Pistols were a mere construct, a prototype Take That fashioned simply to sell unfortunate trousers, and that their solitary album of original material was, well, just an album; unsophisticated, iconoclastic, raw, but a bit of a paper tiger. Diaspora Problems is sad, funny and, above all, brutal – the sound of a band contending with the horrors of racism and capitalism with an absurdist grin and an uncompromising eye. Fusing raw, flayed hardcore with dense rap, meme-ish humour, horn sections and jagged samples, Soul Glo reorient punk towards its anarchic and anti-capitalist roots, away from the When We Were Young-ified TikTok punk aesthetic and towards something that – in a rarity for 2022 – felt genuinely vital and transgressive. SD 19 Dry Cleaning – Stumpwork In spite of a co-frontman stint with the original line-up of The Heartbreakers, bass-toting, mannered vocalist Hell’s incarnation of the ‘punk’ sound had way more in common with Television – the band he’d formed with Tom Verlaine in ‘73 – than with the Dolls. Voidoids’ guitarist Robert Quine matched an edgy Verlaine precision with a brink-dwelling Velvets aggression. Every album from the first volume to The Best Club Anthems 2003 was digitally mixed. Starting with The Very Best Club Anthems ...Ever!, The songs were unmixed.

Black Flag, ‘Damaged’ (1981)

No one owned up to writing the graffiti either: “I think it’s because they can’t spell ‘cunts’ right,” says bassist Michael Bradley. “Who would own up to that?” In a sea of soul revivalists, Gabriels are the rare group actually pushing the genre forward. Their adventurous arrangements swap feelgood retro stylings for confrontational mosaics of samples, and moments where they pull the rug out from under the listener. Rather than dial up the volume or slather on the horns, as their less imaginative peers might, they use painstaking attention to detail as a way of heightening the drama. Equally shapeshifting is frontman Jacob Lusk, who can do diva, Nina and gut-wrenching balladeer at the light of the touchpaper: just listen to how he tastes the danger and deliciousness in the word “taboo” in a song of the same name. LS 26 The 1975 – Being Funny in a Foreign Language

The holy trinity of punk were so perfectly formed in 1977 that it’s hard to imagine the scene without any one of them. The Pistols: searing and sneering, nihilistic and iconic (the artwork, the clothes). The Damned: the court jesters. Daft, tough, Tiswas-anarchic, a British Stooges/MC5. And The Clash: the guttersnipes and street punks, the voice you could relate to, and without whom it’s hard to imagine The Jam, Stiff Little Fingers, Sham 69 or Generation X, let alone Green Day, Rancid, or maybe even U2. EMI, Chrysalis, Polygram, Polydor, Phonogram, A&M, Warner Music, Sony Music, Castle Communications, Demon, Bright Music, Trojan and Templemill Music. Exploding out of Belfast and breathing new life into a flagging punk scene, Stiff Little Fingers – fronted by raw-throated firebrand Jake Burns – saw their debut album Inflammable Material album reach the UK Top 20 on its release in 1979. The raw, angst-ridden sound influenced largely by the Irish Troubles, Inflammable Material veered from spiky anthems like Suspect Device and White Noise to a remarkably mature take on Bob Marley’s Johnny Was that shone a light on the vibrant quartet’s burgeoning abilities. Alongside New Rose, there was the irrepressible Neat Neat Neat and sinister beauties like I Fall, Born To Kill and So Messed Up. Feel The Pain alluded to illicit bouts of S&M, while Fan Club examined the wobbly lines between band worship and manipulation.

6 Reviews

It’s true that Idol couldn’t keep his predilection for pop under wraps for long – a fact adeptly displayed by Generation X becoming one of the first UK punk bands to appear on Top Of The Pops in late ‘77. Not long after, the band’s descent into obscurity began. Idol fixed his eyes on the bright lights and departed for the charts in 1979. This volume features repeats of songs featured in previous volumes from the series; The Stone Roses' "What The World Is Waiting For" featured on Volume 3, and Mansun's "Wide Open Space" featured on Volume 5, although the version of "Wide Open Space" here is a remix by Paul Oakenfold. The Clash articulated the frustrations of working class kids in a way that the chin-stroking protest pop of previous generations couldn’t hope to, in a way that was more inclusive than the fury of the Pistols or the Damned’s goth theatre. (And, yeah genius, we know the irony: Joe Strummer went to a private boarding school and his father was a top diplomat. Hate to break it to you but David Bowie wasn’t really a spaceman, Tom Waits wasn’t a hobo and Ice-T didn’t really kill cops.) Although most albums use the Album in the World...Ever! suffix, some towards the late 1990s change the suffix to Anthems...Ever!, with a plural on the theme (example the album The Best Celtic Anthems...Ever!). Some even just use ...Ever! as a suffix (such as The Best TV Ads...Ever!) We’re just little country bumpkins’ … Hester Chambers and Rhian Teasdale of Wet Leg. Photograph: Hollie Fernando

After spending her whole career interrogating the norms and systems that bind us, the Norwegian songwriter turned her focus inwards to work out whether her own beliefs still served her and where they had come from in the first place. As with so many records released this year, she found a possible future guiding light in remaining open to possibility, a spirit she conveyed in her most plainly beautiful and openhearted music to date: lilting reggae, light-headed euphoria and sparkling choruses. LS 27 Gabriels – Angels & Queens – Part 1

This is a CD compilation of power ballads. Several editions have been released since the first album, Power Ballads – The Greatest Driving Anthems in the World... Ever!, was released in 2004. The ultimate gang of punk outriders, The Stranglers never bothered to endear themselves to the mainstream public or the music press. Early gigs often saw mass walkouts and punch-ups. In 1975, two years before their debut single, Melody Maker sneered that “the only sense in which The Stranglers could be considered new wave is that no one had the gall to palm off this rubbish before”. It’s a put-down that sounds even more risible today, given a catalogue with some 23 hit singles and 17 Top 40 albums. In 2004, a 1-disc edited version of the first volume was released to unknown ventures with different artwork. Unusual for compilation albums, the "Brimful of Asha" featured on disc two is the original version, not the Norman Cook remix which reached #1 in the UK charts. It’s a chance encounter, to be sure: As Jello Biafra joined up with what would become Dead Kennedys in San Francisco, he and his new bandmates discovered he couldn’t play guitar. Instead, he would hum and sing what he thought the music should sound like behind his lyrics, and the players would build compositions from there. The results have punk’s anger, but there’s a particular chug in Klaus Flouride’s bass and twang in East Bay Ray’s guitar that set up rhythmic noise in songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” before crashing down around listeners’ ears come chorus time.

The series was immensely popular, and most of the volumes performed well in the compilation charts, with some even making number one. The series started to become subject to popular culture parodies, such as spoof band Shirehorses titling their first album from 1997 The worst...album in the world...ever...EVER!. Blur, who appeared on some of the albums in the series, were originally going to title their 2000 compilation Blur: The Best of as Best Blur Album in the World Ever. If The Clash never really disavowed White Riot, they also never recorded anything like it again. It split the audience and ultimately split the band too.

X-Ray Spex, ‘Germfree Adolescents’ (1978)

Rosalía’s third album delights in flinging diverse, even contradictory styles together – dembow, hip-hop, dubstep, salsa, industrial, bachata, the experimental electronics of Arca, R&B, flamenco, pure radio-ready pop – and presenting the results to the listener with an insouciant take-it-or-leave-it shrug. It’s the work of an artist who clearly sees her success as a platform that enables her to do what she wants rather than as an end in itself. “Es mala amante la fama y no va a quererme de verdad,” as the Weeknd puts it on their collaboration La Fama: fame’s a lousy lover and won’t ever love you for real. Better to exploit it than chase it. Read more. Alexis Petridis 4 Charli XCX – Crash They formed as the Guildford Stranglers in 1974. Support slots with Patti Smith and the Ramones introduced them to a wider punk audience, while a balance of quality and productivity (their first three albums span just 13 months) brought a loyal following of their own. “More hard-core punks definitely didn’t like us,” Burnel remarked later. The Swedish pop star’s fifth – and first independent – album works as a decent primer for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to the past few years in pop. It’s got Dua-style disco (thanks in part to sharing a collaborator in SG Lewis), Charli XCX’s death drive and one of those now-ubiquitous, infuriatingly catchy Y2K pop interpolations in 2 Die 4, which, quite bafflingly, samples Crazy Frog’s 2005 cover of Gershon Kingsley’s 1969 song Popcorn. Consequently Tove Lo is less of an eye-popping presence here than on her previous records, though her apparent recalcitrance makes her unusual anxiety and conflict around relationships and intensity all the more striking. LS 48 Kojey Radical – Reasons to Smile The Best Air Guitar Album in the World...Ever!, referred to in retrospect as Air Guitar I, released 5 November 2001, was compiled by Brian May. A sequel was released in November 2002 and another in November 2003, the latter proclaiming itself to be the last Air Guitar Album in the World...Ever!. Both sequels were again compiled by Brian May. In 2005, a 3CD The Best of the Best Air Guitar Album in the World...Ever! was released. Whilst Air Guitar III proclaimed to be the final volume, the liner notes written by May in The Best of the Best start with "OK, we lied."