Support The Quietus
Our journalism is funded by our readers. Become a subscriber today to help champion our writing, plus enjoy bonus essays, podcasts, playlists and music downloads.
Spotlighting the impact of cultural landmarks
Two themes are routinely described as transformative for Primal Scream’s celebrated 1991 recording: acid house and Andrew Weatherall. But, as Ben Gilbert outlines, other factors led to an album that was both era-defining and defined by the era in which it was made
It was supposed to be the moment where the most misunderstood woman in pop got to explain herself and empower her audience: but the release was cancelled and within months she was dead. Angus Batey revisits Lisa Lopes's debut and rediscovers a forgotten treasure
Angus Batey finds permanence in a record that is often seen as a document of fleeting change and talks about "Hevvo"'s contentious reputation, slammed by Bill Drummond as "dull as ditchwater" in 45 and held up as art for the ages by Cathi Unsworth in Weirdo
25 years ago The Boss played Brixton Academy as part of his least successful tour since his first but, says, Liam Inscoe-Jones, while he may have been underperforming catastrophically in financial terms, this was also a time of creative rebirth
By 1995 Stereolab should have been at the peak of their powers, so why didn't it feel that way to Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier? Fergal Kinney examines the series of events that saw the band escape the dead end they'd ended up in culminating in the release of one of their most celebrated albums
Though they’d split by the time of its release, Recurring wasn’t so much a farewell from Spacemen 3 as a calling card for Pete Kember’s Spectrum and Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized. Julian Marszalek gets caught in the middle 30 years on
There was grey and gravel-flavoured BlokeMusic before him. But, argues David Bennun, the tepid indie-folk mumbler’s commercial success ensured that an awful lot more came after him – and we’re still living with the consequences 20 years on
A concept album that transcended its concept, a stealth mix-CD, global disco, sampledelic exotica, yacht rock by other means: the Australian group’s debut was many things, writes David Bennun - and above all it was, and remains, a joy
Out of tragedy came triumph. But that didn’t shake AC/DC out of their state of arrested development – it simply cemented it to capture the joys of adolescence for generations of adolescents to come. Julian Marszalek gets his schoolboy shorts on
Because of the death of Ian Curtis and the nature of the band's last recordings, Joy Division's Closer is an album around which a stillness has settled. In truth, says Jonathan Wright as he talks to Peter Hook and Paul Morley, no band evolved so rapidly. All Joy Division portraits courtesy of Kevin Cummins
Compass Point Studios, and its house band the Compass Point All Stars, were going to be Chris Blackwell and Island Records’ defining statement to the world. Instead, they provided Grace Jones’s. And that, says David Bennun, looking back at the three extraordinary records she made there between 1980 and 1982, is more than enough
Forty years ago this month, two British bands released albums that would set the course for metal over the following decade. But it’s not the similarities between Iron Maiden and British Steel that are most telling, it’s the differences