Black Flag

Essential Albums

  • Damaged
    Damaged
    Damaged

    What makes Damaged revolutionary isn’t just its speed or rage, but how the band wields it. They have their targets: consumerism (“Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie”), apathy (“TV Party”), authority (“Police Story,” “Spray Paint”). But where Bad Brains captured hardcore’s romance and Minor Threat its philosophical purity, Black Flag’s Damaged is its first existential statement, an album that uses the outward physicality of punk as a tool for inner exploration. It’s easy to squint at guitarist Greg Ginn’s love of the Grateful Dead—wasn’t punk supposed to be a reaction to the dippy intangibilities of the hippie movement?—but it also makes sense. For as much as Black Flag symbolizes hardcore’s societal rebellion, Damaged is ultimately an album about journeying to the limits of your head. “Damaged,” Henry Rollins screams on the album-closing “Damaged I.” “My damage/No one comes in/Stay out.” Not the state’s, not his parents’, not his friends—his. Musically, they took what they loved from Television and the Ramones and made it faster, harder, and bleaker (“Depression”). But they also tapped into spoken-word poetry (“Damaged I”), sludge metal (“Life of Pain”), and noisy jams that took the discord of punk into almost avant-garde territory—sounds that they’d explore further over the course of their short, hugely impacting career. Damaged helped invent hardcore, but its real legacy is how it shaped nearly every form of extreme guitar-based music that came after.

Albums

Artist Playlists

Live Albums

Compilations

More To Hear

About Black Flag

Black Flag didn’t just accelerate the sound of punk to create hardcore: They wrote the DIY survival guide that’s been passed down to generations of indie rockers. Formed by guitarist/mastermind Greg Ginn and vocalist Keith Morris after seeing their first Ramones show in 1976, Black Flag boast an infamous history marked by rotating lead singers, contrarian stylistic shifts, and police confrontations. But through that constant chaos, Black Flag furthered the notion that a band’s fundamental ideologies—as manifest in their own SST Records imprint and their get-in-the-van/tour-or-die philosophy—were greater than any individual member. Even if their output had been limited to the EPs they released between 1979 and 1981, Black Flag would be legends for unleashing snotty circle-pit standards like “Nervous Breakdown.” But following the recruitment of Henry Rollins for their 1981 debut album, Damaged, Black Flag reached the peak of their powers, plumbing new lyrical extremes in psychological torment and anti-authoritarian rage, while blazing a trail beyond hardcore that paved the way for myriad underground subgenres like stoner rock, doom metal, and jazz-punk. Black Flag disbanded in 1986, though Ginn has periodically corralled new line-ups in the 21st century. But no matter who’s in the group, Black Flag’s iconic four-bars logo remains a visual shorthand for fierce nonconformity.

ORIGIN
Hermosa Beach, CA, United States
FORMED
1976
GENRE
Punk

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada