Initially given a merciless thrashing on release, the album has now, rightly, claimed its place as one of punk’s most influential albums, thanks in no small part to its pioneering effect on the then nascent post-punk movement. The album inspired a legion of bands in its wake. “It’s flattering, but it makes me feel uncomfortable because I don’t see us in the same categories that I see our idols,” said Holland of the album’s legacy. “Making you want to start a band is what the Ramones, Sex Pistols and The Clash do. Not us!” That album had catchy riffs. We loved bands that were very punk, but these bands didn’t always have great melodies. We added something musically memorable to the energy of punk music.”

So, with Thanksgiving, a uniquely American holiday on the horizon, we give thanks to British punk. One! Two! Three! Four! In spite of a co-frontman stint with the original line-up of The Heartbreakers, bass-toting, mannered vocalist Hell’s incarnation of the ‘punk’ sound had way more in common with Television – the band he’d formed with Tom Verlaine in ‘73 – than with the Dolls. Voidoids’ guitarist Robert Quine matched an edgy Verlaine precision with a brink-dwelling Velvets aggression.Acts like Blondie and The Jam had kept a degree of personality in the music scene; the real draw was Talking Heads. Although they had been born in the embers of punk, they didn’t really fit there. In fact, they didn’t really fit anywhere. That was exactly as David Byrne and the band preferred it, so they pushed forward to make themselves that most desirable of things—unique. It meant Byrne’s lyrics got stranger, his performances more entangled within themselves, and his costuming grew to unimaginable levels. Byrne, to all intents and purposes, made himself irregular on purpose. A brilliant comment on The A/V Club’s review of All Mod Cons says: “The best thing about the Jam was their uncompromised Britishness. The Clash may have been bored with the USA, but The Jam acted like (apart from soul music) they’d never even heard of the place.” The first truly great album by The Jam, All Mod Cons is not necessarily the band’s best or most punk album – Setting Sons and Sound Affects pip it on both counts – but it is the one closest to the UK punk’s ground zero and the one that truly cemented them as the voice of British youth. In all essential respects, X’s Los Angeles was not that different from the city Jim Morrison celebrated and damned in his work with the Doors. In fact, the Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, became X’s producer. ‘I thought Exene was the next step after Patti Smith,’ Manzarek told writer Richard Cromelin. ‘She takes it further than any woman has ever taken it.’” If Social Distortion had come from the UK, it’s most likely they would have been lumped into the burgeoning psychobilly scene and forced to spend their career playing with the likes of The Meteors and King Kurt. So fortunate for them, really, that they grew up in Fullerton, Orange County where their barnets were safe from ludicrous barberism and gigs free from eggs and flour. Along with other neighbouring Orange County bands TSOL, The Vandals, Agent Orange and The Adolescents, Social Distortion’s blues ‘n’ country-filtered punk was a big influence on the burgeoning SoCal punk scene of the 80s and 90s. When I hear this record, I think, ‘This must be what electricity sounds like.’ The way Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played guitars together is so fascinating to me. A very influential band.”

This was the first and purest expression by these San Pedro, California, cultural radicals and it really delivered on punk’s anti-pop promise with a sonic spew that only by the most liberal standards could be called songs. There are no choruses or versus here, just one minute blasts of inspired rage loosely held together by D. Boone's ranting vocals and Mike Watts’ blurting bass. The seven cuts rendered in under seven minutes on this 1980 EP are probably mistakenly credited for inspiring hardcore and are now available on CD as part of the Minuteman compilation, Post-Mersh, Vol. 3 (SST). Along with Strummer and Jake Burns, it was the moment that Weller became the Poet Laureate of council estate kids everywhere. That song, ‘One Hundred Years’, is one of many songs highlighting The Cure’s new direction. Having followed a similar path to Siouxsie and The Banshees (emerging from punk to find a new artistic channel), the group use their post-punk sensibilities to capture the intense feeling of the band’s regeneration. He continues, “Their first album, Unknown Pleasures, is an absolute masterpiece.” One can’t disagree either. It provided a sense of artistic evolution and the purity of art itself. It suggested a new avenue of the mainstream for us to explore by including a reem of bruising songs that captured the attention of everybody who heard it. With a chequered, tragic history and ever-revolving line-up, Social Distortion released just seven albums in the space of 28 years, but quite appropriately, their most recent, 2011’s Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes was put out by the label whose stable of many bands they inspired: Epitaph.In Los Angeles in 1980, the first wave of local punk bands, including incendiary art-punks X, had established a groundswell of allegiance among the disillusioned. “Punk in LA was reacting against the great success and dominance of bands like Van Halen,” explains Mark Vallen, an illustrator for Slash, the influential West Coast punk magazine. “Just the whole look and feel of it reeked of elitism.” For follow-up album Ixany On The Hombre, The Offspring would leave revered SoCal punk label Epitaph in favour of Sony’s Columbia. And the rest is platinum-plated history. The greatest punk album of all time was made by a band trying to escape punk. Not its intent, force or even attitude, but its implied restrictions and captivity by fundamentalists. The Clash had gently expanded their scope on their second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope, but on London Calling they blew everything apart: styles, dynamics, vantage point and subject matter.

When melodic metalcore exploded in the early 2000s, it was often tied right in with emo-pop, but Wristmeetrazor imagine a much darker, gothier version of that genre. Their sophomore LP Replica of a Strange Love is full of infectious riffs that sound like the best parts of the Trustkill/Ferret Records era, but their soaring hooks and creepy industrial sections bring to mind White Pony era Deftones and Downward Spiral era Nine Inch Nails. The ingredients are all familiar, but rarely combined like this, and it’s a testament to Wristmeetrazor’s power that they’re able to offer up such time-tested thrills in a way that genuinely feels innovative. Matching the darkness of the music is that of frontman Justin Fornof’s lyrics, which pull equally from personal experience and classical philosophy and use vivid poetic imagery to tap into the depths of human emotion. On all levels, from the bone-crushing breakdowns to the lyrical melodrama, this album is intense. In a 2016 tweet, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong declared war on pop-punk. “I’ve always hated the phrase,” he explained later in Kerrang! “I think it’s a contradiction in terms. Either you’re punk, or you’re not.” A very influential album with regard to what we now recognize as alternative music. With power-soaked guitar noise, angular riffs and angry, witty political lyrics, this album is the reason bands like Fugazi exist. Their second album, Solid Gold, was equally awesome—but after that, they completely lost it. Joyce Manor’s early years were spent oscillating between frenetic punk and heart-on-sleeve pop. “The first thing we did was pop-punk wanting to be hardcore, and we succeeded,”guitarist-singer Barry Johnson told L.A. Record after his band released their third album, Never Hungover Again. “That gave us the confidence to focus on more pop stuff, which we wouldn’t have had the confidence to do before – to really wanna write actual pop songs, for better or worse.” It was for the better: Never Hungover Again is a titanic punch of yearning, winsome pop-forward tunes delivered in an efficient 19 minutes. Here, Joyce Manor smoothed out the edges of their songs, letting their melodies breathe and clearing room for their hooks to hit the gut. Johnson’s pensive bellows and empathetic lyrics about youthful mistakes (“Heart Tattoo”) and post-adolescent malaise (“Catalina Fight Song”) helped make Never Hungover Againa pop-punk album even people who hated pop-punk could find joy in. L.G.Why it was so influential: Savages brought with them a dose of much-needed mythology, and raised valuable questions about why women in punk are so frequently branded as bolshy or intimidating. Fontaines DC, ‘Dogrel’ (2019) Why it was so influential: It’s really impossible to overstate the effect that ‘The Scream’ had on gothic-minded groups like The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Psychedelic Furs – all post-punk purveyors in their own right. The Fall, ‘Live at the Witch Trials’ (1979) Readopting the surname Lydon, the erstwhile Rotten – having cleansed his musical palate with a trip to Jamaica, talent-spotting for Virgin’s reggae imprint Front Line – assembled his new troops for his next assault on prevailing sonic conservatism: Public Image Ltd, and their debut album First Issue. Released on April 8 1994, The Offspring’s third studio album would herald pop-punk’s mainstream acceptance. Through the likes of The Offspring, Green Day and then Blink-182, it would become even bigger than grunge; the preceding underground music scene also swiftly commercialised.