The Velvet Underground & Nico (45th Anniversary Edition)

Editors’ Notes Between its reimagining of blues drone, avant-garde distortion, and doo-wop transcendence into a blueprint for all things punk, goth, and shoegaze, The Velvet Underground’s banana-adorned debut invented the future—way back in 1967. The fact that songs like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Venus In Furs,” and “Heroin” dared to tread uncharted drugs-and-kinky-sex backstreets helped too. Moe Tucker’s drumming is as deadpan as Lou Reed’s vocals, John Cale’s electric viola is straight-up haunting, and Nico, on “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Femme Fatale,” plays the ice queen to end all ice queens.