The crate
Every sleeve in the encyclopedia, in no order at all. Narrow it to a decade, a genre, a country or a scene, or shuffle and see what comes up.
Pulled from the crate 1 of 12
The Album
548 records from the 1980s. Clear the filters
Your pile
The records you set aside from the stack, kept in this browser for when there is time to listen.
Nothing set aside yet. Press Set aside under a record in the stack and it lands here.
Themed crates
One crate for each scene in the encyclopedia, holding the records its bands made while it was happening. Pick one and the stack is dealt from it.
- Scene of the day Palm Desert Teenagers in the Californian desert with a petrol generator, a long way from anyone who could stop them. 7 records
- Canterbury A small circle of musicians from one English town who kept swapping between each other's bands. 18 records
- Detroit Two bands in a car-factory town who played louder and uglier than anyone had a commercial reason to. 6 records
- Birmingham An industrial city that invented heavy metal and, twenty years later, invented a way to make it sound like the factories. 30 records
- Krautrock German musicians with no interest in the blues, building rock again from the rhythm up. 14 records
- CBGB, New York A Bowery bar where American punk assembled itself, two years before London made it a headline. 9 records
- London punk The same conclusion as CBGB, reached independently and delivered as provocation rather than art. 11 records
- NWOBHM Hundreds of British bands who took metal back from the arenas, pressed their own singles and accidentally armed the next four genres. 18 records
- Washington DC hardcore The scene that produced straight edge, then reacted against its own toughness and produced emo. 9 records
- Bay Area thrash Californian teenagers who listened to NWOBHM and hardcore punk at the same time and drew the logical conclusion. 22 records
- Sunset Strip A mile and a half of Los Angeles where image counted as much as music, and both paid. 17 records
- Seattle A local scene and a marketing mythology, built deliberately and then overtaken by its own success. 10 records
- Tampa One Florida studio that recorded most of American death metal's first wave. 14 records
- New Orleans Black Sabbath filtered through hardcore and a production that sounds like a damp room. 14 records
- Stockholm death metal The other first wave of death metal, recorded in one basement studio through one distortion pedal. 8 records
- Gothenburg Three bands in one Swedish city arriving independently at the same solution. 12 records
- Helvete, Oslo A record shop in Oslo, a small circle of bands, and the most notorious three years in metal. 8 records
- Finnish metal The one country where metal became ordinary - on the radio, at the wedding, and briefly at Eurovision. 23 records
- Montreal A rehearsal building in the Mile End, a label that refused to promote anything, and two bands who took it in opposite directions. 6 records
- Massachusetts metalcore Hardcore kids who took Gothenburg's guitar harmonies, and one band who went the other way entirely. 8 records
- Australian metalcore A surf town and a set of suburban halls, ten thousand miles from any label that mattered, on the first generation who did not need one. 8 records
