Damaged

Sound DNA

• Punk
• Hardcore

• raw
• aggressive
• punky

About

What makes <i>Damaged</i> revolutionary isn’t just its speed or rage, but how the band wields it. They have their targets: consumerism (“Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie”), apathy (“TV Party”), authority (“Police Story,” “Spray Paint”). But where Bad Brains captured hardcore’s romance and Minor Threat its philosophical purity, Black Flag’s <i>Damaged</i> is its first existential statement, an album that uses the outward physicality of punk as a tool for inner exploration. It’s easy to squint at guitarist Greg Ginn’s love of the Grateful Dead—wasn’t punk supposed to be a reaction to the dippy intangibilities of the hippie movement?—but it also makes sense. For as much as Black Flag symbolizes hardcore’s societal rebellion, <i>Damaged</i> is ultimately an album about journeying to the limits of your head. “Damaged,” Henry Rollins screams on the album-closing “Damaged I.” “My damage/No one comes in/Stay out.” Not the state’s, not his parents’, not his friends—<i>his</i>. Musically, they took what they loved from Television and the Ramones and made it faster, harder, and bleaker (“Depression”). But they also tapped into spoken-word poetry (“Damaged I”), sludge metal (“Life of Pain”), and noisy jams that took the discord of punk into almost avant-garde territory—sounds that they’d explore further over the course of their short, hugely impacting career. <i>Damaged</i> helped invent hardcore, but its real legacy is how it shaped nearly every form of extreme guitar-based music that came after.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits