SST Records: the label that built the American underground

The album that gave the label its spine. Damaged (1981) was Black Flag's first full-length and Henry Rollins' debut behind the mic, and it's hardcore at its most paranoid and depressive rather than its most political. MCA's distribution chief called it an "anti-parent record" and refused to ship it, so SST put it out themselves. "Rise Above," "Depression," "TV Party." The sound of suburban dread with no exit.

Forty-five songs, most under two minutes, none wasting a note. The San Pedro trio of D. Boon, Mike Watt and George Hurley folded funk and free jazz into punk's economy on this 1984 double LP, and the title is a joke about driving the speed limit (double nickels, 55) on the 110 freeway. Watt has admitted it was partly an arms-race answer to Hüsker Dü's double album. It remains the most generous record SST ever released.

The album Double Nickels was racing. Hüsker Dü's 1984 concept double follows a kid running from a broken home and finding the world outside worse, told in 23 songs cut fast and cheap over a couple of days. Bob Mould's guitar runs as a single distorted sheet; Grant Hart's melodies keep surfacing through it. The closing 14-minute instrumental "Reoccurring Dreams" was a single live take they couldn't afford to redo.

After two years frozen by a lawsuit, Black Flag came back slower and meaner. Side B of My War (1984) is three long, dragging dirges that the hardcore kids hated and the next generation studied like scripture. The Melvins heard it, the Seattle bands heard it, and sludge metal essentially starts here. Greg Ginn played the bass himself under the alias Dale Nixon.

A hardcore band that took acid and never quite came back. The Kirkwood brothers' Phoenix trio turned punk speed into smeared psychedelic country on this 1984 record, with Curt's slurred, sunstruck melodies wandering off-key on purpose. Most people met it secondhand: Nirvana played "Plateau," "Oh, Me" and "Lake of Fire" with the Kirkwoods on MTV Unplugged in 1993, and a cult record became a footnote in a famous one.

Doom metal on a hardcore label, which made no commercial sense and total artistic sense. Born Too Late (1986) is Scott "Wino" Weinrich's first album as Saint Vitus' singer, and the title track is a Black Sabbath crawl about being an outcast born into the wrong decade. Nobody wanted slow, heavy worship music in 1986. That's exactly why it sounds untouched now.

The pop instincts winning. New Day Rising (1985) sharpens the melodies buried in Zen Arcade's noise, and "Celebrated Summer" is as close as American hardcore got to a pure pop song without surrendering the volume. This is the bridge: a year later the band signed to Warner and dragged the whole underground toward the majors with them.

The DC band who could outplay everyone, finally building something to hold all of it. I Against I (1986) fuses their impossible hardcore speed with metal, funk and reggae, and H.R.'s voice does things no punk singer had any right to. Proof that a hardcore band could grow up without going soft, and most who tried only managed one of those.

The point where the noise turned seductive. EVOL (1986) was Sonic Youth's first with drummer Steve Shelley, and their detuned New York skronk starts arranging itself into something you could call songs. It ends with "Expressway to Yr Skull," a slow Reagan-era death trip Neil Young once called the best guitar song ever written. The art-damage and the beauty stop fighting here.

If EVOL was the thaw, Sister (1987) is the bloom. Loosely haunted by Philip K. Dick and the twin sister who died in his infancy, it's the album where the prepared guitars and the pop hooks lock fully together. "Schizophrenia" opens it like a door swinging in wind. Everything that made Daydream Nation possible is already here, tighter and stranger.

The loudest melodies of the decade. On their 1987 second album J Mascis buries Lou Barlow's bass under a guitar tone like a collapsing building, then writes hooks sweet enough to survive the avalanche. The volume-and-tenderness formula here ran through the next fifteen years of indie rock. The tension between Mascis and Barlow ran straight into Sebadoh.

Born from a death and a fan letter. After D. Boon was killed in a van crash in December 1985, Mike Watt had quit music for good, until a 22-year-old Ohio kid named Ed Crawford turned up in San Pedro and talked him and George Hurley into a new band. Ragin', Full-On (1986) is the result: looser and more limber than the Minutemen, a man learning how to keep going.

Grunge incubating in plain sight. Before Sub Pop and the majors, Soundgarden made their debut album for SST in 1988: Sabbath riffs filtered through punk, Chris Cornell's range already absurd. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance, then the band spent decades hating the mix so much they re-recorded the whole thing in 2017. The songs were always there.

The Northwest before the gold rush. Out of Ellensburg, Washington, the Screaming Trees played psychedelic garage rock with Mark Lanegan's tar-black baritone riding over the Conner brothers' churn. This 1987 SST album gave them their first real platform, years before grunge made the region a brand. Lanegan already sounds like a man who has seen the ending.

The label's prankster fringe. The Bay Area collective built Escape from Noise (1987) out of tape loops, found sound and culture-jamming, and its centerpiece, "Christianity Is Stupid," loops a ranting preacher into something between comedy and threat. They later staged a hoax tying the song to a fake axe murder. Four years on, a sample fight with U2 nearly bankrupted them. SST was the only place this fit.

The melodic root of everything pop-punk owes a debt to. Manhattan Beach's Descendents wrote fast, lovesick, hooky songs about coffee and rejection, and the 1982 title is literal. Singer Milo Aukerman left the band to study biology. It came out on New Alliance, the Watt-and-Boon label SST later absorbed, which makes it family. Bad Religion, Green Day and a thousand others are downstream of this.