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.’” It was, at the time, a truly unique game-changer. In the years after their split, many have attempted to imitate Refused, but none have captured the wild energy of this album. So when the Swedes returned in 2012, to face audiences hundreds of times bigger than those they played to in 1998, it was a relief to find the fire, intelligence, passion and sheer energy was burning brighter than ever before. Refused, it turned out, weren’t quite as dead as they claimed. And this album still sounds like the future. 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. Along with Strummer and Jake Burns, it was the moment that Weller became the Poet Laureate of council estate kids everywhere.

It would be sacrilege for Sex Pistols not to appear in the upper region of this list. In fact, some out there will no doubt rebuke me for not having it in first position. Johnny Rotten and the gang weren’t the most talented musicians in the world, nor on this list, for that matter. However, credit must be paid to those who can lift a middle finger to the man and spur cultural upheaval with provocative hits like ‘God Save the Queen’. The whole record sounds truly enormous; listening to ‘Mirage’ feels like standing in the shadow of a toweringly spooky castle, while ‘Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’ proved that aggression can be dished out slowly. And Siouxsie herself has to be one of the best vocalists of the late-’70s – like a severely haunted Velvet Underground and Nico. 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. No one owned up to writing the graffiti either: “I think it’s because they can’t spell ‘cunts’ right,” says bassist Michael Bradley. “Who would own up to that?” 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)At the time, punk wasn’t that well known in Derry,” reflects guitarist John O’Neill. “We had a core following of 50 people or so, but apart from that we were treated with a lot of suspicion.” With their debut album Los Angeles, X combined their bitter rallying against the trappings of high society with an elegant blend of art-punk that placed poetry and expression at its heart. It was a sound that placed them quite at odds with contemporaries like The Germs and Screamers. John Lydon said Richard Hell had nothing to do with punk. He was wrong. Aside from The Ramones’ D-U-M-B exception to the rule, NYC’s CBGB-based version of punk was significantly more cerebral than its largely visceral McLaren encouraged UK counterpart, and Hell – poet, style icon, novelist, nihilist, perfectionist, arsonist – was its nearly man. He could (should) have been huge: broodingly handsome, literate, ambitious, it was Hell who pioneered the electrocuted crop punk hairstyle and first repurposed torn T-shirts with safety pins. I don’t give a shit that Raw Power didn’t make our top spot: If punk is about spewing bile at musical norms, than this album is more punk than any release, by any band, will ever be. Raw Power is eight songs of the filthiest guitar-based music made by American musicians, in any genre. Christ, even “Gimme Danger,” a pop song in many ways, sounds menacing and eventually lapses into chaos.

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. It’s a chance encounter, to be sure: As Jello Biafra joined up with what would become Dead Kennedys in San Francisco, he and his new bandmates discovered he couldn’t play guitar. Instead, he would hum and sing what he thought the music should sound like behind his lyrics, and the players would build compositions from there. The results have punk’s anger, but there’s a particular chug in Klaus Flouride’s bass and twang in East Bay Ray’s guitar that set up rhythmic noise in songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” before crashing down around listeners’ ears come chorus time. Why it was so influential: Without Elastica’s Justine Frischmann we might not have M.I.A – they lived together post-Elastica and the vocalist became something of a mentor, earning co-writing credit’s on M.I.A’s 2003 debut album ‘Arular’. Interpol, ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’ (2002)

In 1981 they released the brilliant Juju, and it signified a big change, not only in The Banshees’ sound but also in Britain’s culture entirely. The brazen and bratty side of punk had resided, and now there was something more artistic awaiting the group. With Steve Severin’s basslines and Siouxsie’s theatrical vocals, the move into something new was always likely to be a touch darker. 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. Crass put out some truly great albums, and perhaps there is none greater in their catalogue than Penis Envy, an impassioned, HMV-banned, 30-minute anarcha-feminist rant that took aim at various facets of female oppression, and featured exclusively female vocals in the form of Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre. The album won the band a not-insignificant amount of good, old-fashioned tabloid outrage when they successfully managed to pull off a hoax offering a flexi disc single from the album to be given away free with teeny bopper magazine Loving, drumming them up a shit load of free press in the process. Few bands, punk or otherwise, have ever been so controversial. And, yes, they did split up in 1984. The album’s centrepiece, the electrifying New Noise, remains one of the most astonishing calls to arms ever committed to record. Eloquent, charismatic frontman Denis Lyxzen’s screams and whoops are as joyful as they are intense, and they echoed down through the generation of new bands that followed them. The moment, half way through the song, when the sound fades, before building to a truly gargantuan chorus of riotous crowd noise and elephantine riffs, makes you feel absolutely invincible. 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.

Why it was so influential: Gang of Four’s kid-in-a-sweet-shop approach to genre – snatching up elements of disco, funk and dub – didn’t just shape post-punk’s scattershot approach. ‘Entertainment! also influenced everything from rap to grunge: Kurt Cobain once said that Nirvana began as a partial rip-off of Gang of Four. Joy Division, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ (1979) 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. 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 Savages emerged in 2011, they came with their own mythology that felt ripped from another time; at early shows Jehnny Beth goaded crowds from inside a wooden cage and the band laid out their creative vision in a succinct manifesto. “If you are focused, you are harder to reach,” read the front of their debut album ‘Silence Yourself’. “If you are distracted, you are available.” And it was an ethos that informed every last note; brutal, industrial, rib-cage juddering post-punk without an ounce of bagginess. 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.”In the face of the onslaught of their imitators, it’s easy to forget what a breath of fresh air Bad Religion was in ’88. Suffer broke the brutal testosterone-infused chokehold of hardcore on punk and along the way introduced a new generation to the forgotten art of writing lyrics and melodies. It also didn’t hurt that Brett Gurewitz and Greg Graffin knew how to balance their rage with heavy doses of intellect and weren’t such tough guys that the thought of adding a little harmony into a tune didn’t fill them with mortal terror. This record is an addictive joy for the myriad experiences of youth, for the eternal combination of pleasure, excitement, boredom, anger, and frustration that everyone experiences during that fragile transition between adolescence and adulthood,” wrote PopMatters in 2003. “That attitude is mirrored in the hot-wired treble sound of the record, a sound so tightly wound it threatens to jump off the turntable at any moment and sear your brain. Wayne Kramer’s guitar continuously asserts its presence with a maddeningly propulsive manic energy that makes you forget that the Who, the Kinks, or the Kingsmen ever existed.” 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 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. New Jersey trio the Ergs! went into recording their debut with low expectations: “We were just like, ‘Let’s make this thing, I guess,'” drummer-vocalist Mike Yannich, a.k.a. Mikey Erg, told Noisey. “There was no real thought process to it, just like, ‘Bands make albums, let’s make albums.'” Despite their lax attitude, the band ended up with an urgent, infectious pop-punk tour de force, the sort of album that makes you want to pogo jump while screaming about heartbreak. “I’m in love, I’m in trouble!” Erg yells on the aptly named “First Song Side One,” riffing on the Replacements and announcing a 16-song LP that lasts just 32 minutes. Along the way, Yannich & Co. touch on everything from hardcore to hip-hop and doo-wop (to say nothing of references to The Simpsons and Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van book). But the album never strays far from its speedy, melodic roots, helping to secure the band’s cult-fave status among the pop-punk faithful. P.V.

Why it was so influential: Just listen to virtually any ’80s pop record that came out after ‘Dare’ to hear its hallmarks. Elastica, ‘Elastica’ (1995) 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) 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.

Green Day, ‘Kerplunk’ (1991)

Legend goes that the boys were ready to release a single album that would follow in the tradition of their previous work. However, after hearing Husker Du’s double album Zen Arcade they reentered the studio so overflowing with creativity an entire second side was born. That scattershot mess of ideas ultimately serves as the perfect representation of what punk can and should be. Free from constraint, full color and grey, angry and joyous. Punk’s past, present, and future is all here. Why it was so influential: Parquet Courts’ breakthrough moment was so distinctive that it accidentally spawned an entire genre of bands who ‘sound a bit like Parquet Courts’. Savages, ‘Silence Yourself’ (2013) Traditionally dismissed by a derisory media, Sham 69 have been effectively excised from punk history. It’s not as if they didn’t sell records (a consecutive run of irresistibly hooked late-70s chart singles that left punk contemporaries such as The Clash, Damned and Jam choking on their dust) or become influential (the classic Sham template continues to define today’s street-punk). The truth is that Sham 69 were always just a little too uncomfortably authentic for an essentially middle-class, largely metropolitan music press. As Sham’s vocalist Jimmy Pursey so eloquently nailed it in his lyrics to their breakthrough Angels With Dirty Faces hit: ‘ We’re the people you don’t wanna know, we come from places you don’t wanna go.’ 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.