A screaming generation-chasm put to music, Suicidal Tendencies would have the last laugh when the album’s centerpiece - Institutionalized, a song about an adolescent bound for a mental health facility - appeared not only on late-night MTV but also, bizarrely, on an episode of Miami Vice. A hundred thousand record sales duly followed. 8. Rancid, …And Out Come The Wolves (1995) Originally released in a – yes – metal box, the band considered separating with sandpaper the three 12” discs onto which their hypnotic and dependably challenging songs were pressed. All fun and games, but the legacy of PiL endured; the dreamscape guitar work of Keith Levene in particular can be heard throughout the 1980s as replicated by REM, The Cult, and even The Smiths. 15. Dead Kennedys, Frankenchrist (1985)

The Best Punk Album In The WorldEver! by Various Artists The Best Punk Album In The WorldEver! by Various Artists

Sometimes I’m a bit jealous of the certainty that we had in the nineties, the way we said ‘this is the way things are,’” Lyxzen said, five years after the Swedish group had re-formed. “Now I’m more like, ‘I think this is the way things are.’” 5. The Clash, London's Calling (1979) My tastes run mainly to Wagner, Strauss and Mahler but I agree that American Idiot is an absolute 'must have' album. It's superb from start to finish." In receipt of GBH of the earhole from the ol’ good-cop-bad-cop routine, Muir was instructed to sign a form giving access to his medical records, to submit a sample of his handwriting, and to provide prior notification if ever he planned to visit Washington DC. “It was a real experience,” he said.

The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Described as ‘a case study in calculated cruelty’, Converge have carved a celebrated career making the kind of music that ought to carry a government health warning. You Fail Me, the New Englanders’ fifth album, is a work of astounding brutality from a band with the musical chops required to drive their needles purposefully into the red. As aggravating as earache, this is much more than noise for its own sake. 36. Stiff Little Fingers, Inflammable Material (1979) Beloved of everyone that has heard it, …And Out Come The Wolves is the finest American punk record of the nineties. It also happens to be only the third native release of its kind to have attained platinum status in its country of origin. It ended in a mess, obviously, with guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Sid Vicious addicted to heroin, the latter up on a charge of murder for a crime in Manhattan that he probably didn’t commit. But by then Johnny Rotten had formed Public Image Ltd. and found a wildly different way to continue his one-man war with everything, including himself. 1. Green Day, American Idiot (2004)

best pop-punk albums of all time - Alternative Press Magazine Fan poll: 5 best pop-punk albums of all time - Alternative Press

Propelled by the melodic and mischievous songwriting of Glen Danzig, the Misfits played songs about Martians and zombies with the kind of revelry that Ed Wood Jr. might have brought to The Beach Boys. Silly, yes; a classic, certainly. 13. The Damned, Damned Damned Damned (1977) Prior to the release of American Idiot, Rob Cavallo called a meeting at the headquarters of Warner Bros. Records in Burbank, California, for the company’s press officers and sales team. As well producing Green Day’s seventh album, Cavallo was also the president of the label. Bay Dream, the melodic second album from LA’s Culture Abuse, is the only album on this list to feature a member with an acute disability. Singer David Kelling has cerebral palsy, and aims to use his group’s music to change people’s perceptions of the condition by which he is burdened. “No one with cerebral palsy ever gets the girl, or comes in first place, or anything,” he has said. “I hope to change that.” 48. The Rezillos: Can't Stand The Rezillos (1978)Partly political, conceptual, supple, ambitious – the record features not one, but two nine-minute songs – catchy and complete, American Idiot is the sound of a group testing both themselves and the boundaries of the genre they so capably represent. This is what Telegraph readers said: While some bands strive for stardom, Fugazi were concerned only with purity. Refusing to issue merchandise and declining to be interviewed by any publication that carried adverts for alcohol, at the time of the release of Repeater, their debut album, the quartet from Washington DC were playing to a thousand people a night without any help from anyone. While Johnny Rotten sang about anarchy with all the comprehension of a child playing with a hand-grenade – although not even a child would have considered rhyming the word ‘anarchist’ with ‘antichrist’ – for Crass such matters were far more serious. During a career of infamy and provocation, the Epping collective produced a homemade tape that purported to contain a private conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – the Prime Minister was made aware of its existence – and had their music criticised in the House of Commons. With The Feeding Of The 5000, they laid down a marker for hardcore militancy for generations to come. 26. Social Distortion, Somewhere Between Heaven And Hell (1992) They were the unlikeliest of saviors. Suffer was the band’s first album for five years – its predecessor had sold in the hundreds – and their singer, Greg Graffin, was a full-time student at UCLA (today he is a lecturer in evolution at Cornell University). His co-songwriter, Brett Gurewitz, had spent years learning to produce music; when the time came to record his own band, the results were powerful and rich. With the release of Frankenchrist, the third album from the Dead Kennedys, the US authorities decided they’d had just about enough of the country’s most provocative punk band. Aggrieved at the decision to include a poster of H.R. Giger’s painting Penis Landscape in the inner sleeve, the group were charged with violating the Californian penal code.

punk albums every music fan should own - The Telegraph 50 punk albums every music fan should own - The Telegraph

An exercise in nihilism this is not; the pronounced morality of Los Angeles is drawn from the atonality with which it’s delivered. As the music critic Greil Marcus once wrote, ‘X’s vision isn’t fragmented, it’s not second-hand, and its ambition is to discredit any vision that suggests there’s more to life than X says there is.’ 11. Bad Brains, Attitude: the Roir Sessions (1982)It’s a wonder that Millions Of Dead Cops never runs out of steam, let alone targets. As the album ends with the words “and there’s no God in Heaven, so get of your knees”, the sensation is of being beaten bloody by something close to perfection. 6. Refused, the Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts (1998)

The Best Punk Album in the WorldEver, Part 2 - AllMusic The Best Punk Album in the WorldEver, Part 2 - AllMusic

It can surely only be a matter of time before the question "what is punk?" enters the lexicon of philosophical head-scratchers. It’s a sound, for sure, as anyone who has heard the Ramones' first album will know. But it’s also a quality, something that might loosely be termed "attitude", a nebulous vapor that can be attributed to many, from Billie Eilish to Dominic Cummings. What a puzzle. When Billie Joe Armstrong inserted a chant of “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” into Green Day’s performance of the song Bang Bang at the American Music Awards in 2016, he introduced a battle-cry that would resound at protest rallies across the United States for years to come. The slogan in its original form, to which Armstrong replaced the word “war” with the name “Trump”, is taken from the song Born To Die from Millions Of Dead Cops, the finest hardcore punk album ever made. On an LP that can barely contain its own fury, singer Dave Dictor sings about animal rights, transvestite rights, police oppression – “what you gonna do? The mafia in blue, hunting for queers, n_____s, and you” – the craven morality of slumlords, and, even, the idea that John Wayne was a Nazi. The past tense is important, cos he’s “not any more”, not since “life evened the score”, anyway. Each night before taking to the stage The Interrupters prepare for their show by watching the British film Dance Craze. Featuring music from The Specials, The Selecter and Madness, among others, the documentary from 1981 gives a clue as to the young LA band’s motivation when it comes to finding a groove.Described by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch as “the best hardcore punk album of all time,” the first full-length release by Bad Brains is a creation of such precision and power that its game-changing qualities are revered to this day. A compelling live draw in both New York and Washington DC, the Rastafarian quartet’s home city, Attitude… captured the group’s energies without spilling a drop. It’s fearsome stuff, too; such was the pace of its songs that in 1982 the listener might have been forgiven for believing they were playing them at the wrong speed. Perhaps with this in mind, ROIR Records decided to release the collection only on cassette. 10. The Offspring, Smash (1994)