Best Punk Album in The World...Ever

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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.’ In NMTB producer Chris Thomas, the Pistols found their Visconti. Their savant genius was already there – all they needed was an interpreter to translate passion into the language of vinyl, and here it was. A titanic wall of guitars, The Stooges Spectorised, the Dolls Anglicised and John Lydon distilling a lost, dismissed and disenfranchised generation’s directionless, nihilistic fury into succinct spitballs of vented spleen as intense, uncompromising and affecting as any dead poetry. 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.’” Having given Oasis two songs on every album in the series, this is the first volume not to feature any of the bands' music; it does however feature The Chemical Brothers' "Setting Sun" which is co-written by Noel Gallagher and features him on lead vocals. The following Volume 7 also featured no Oasis songs.

In 2005, the series returned with a 3-CD album titled The Best of the Best Air Guitar Albums in the World Ever. Due to the fact volume 3 claimed to be the last volume, the liner notes (written by Brian May) note "OK, we lied". Most of the songs had already appeared on volumes 1, 2 & 3, but there were some which didn't, such as The Darkness' " I Believe in a Thing Called Love" and an exclusive Queen + Paul Rodgers live performance of " Fat Bottomed Girls". In 2003, the success of Volume 1 meant the album was released in the US by Hollywood Records. It was given the new name World's Greatest Air Guitar Album. The album cover featured the same image, but was moved, alongside the new album text. 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. Diaspora Problems is sad, funny and, above all, brutal – the sound of a band contending with the horrors of racism and capitalism with an absurdist grin and an uncompromising eye. Fusing raw, flayed hardcore with dense rap, meme-ish humour, horn sections and jagged samples, Soul Glo reorient punk towards its anarchic and anti-capitalist roots, away from the When We Were Young-ified TikTok punk aesthetic and towards something that – in a rarity for 2022 – felt genuinely vital and transgressive. SD 19 Dry Cleaning – Stumpwork The year’s most streamed album is an old-fashioned romantic epic. Un Verano Sin Ti’s achingly wistful tale of hedonism and heartbreak has a booze-soaked, tearstained mood; it feels tangentially indebted to classic literature (I hear the Bad Bunny of Un Verano Sin Ti, constantly jerking between the heat of partying and ice-cold alienation, as a perverse analogue to Neddy Merrill, from Cheever’s The Swimmer) as well as cinematic worldbuilding breakup albums such as Lorde’s Melodrama. Bad Bunny pairs his heartbroken missives with sublime reggaeton, dembow and bachata, as well as surprising moments of softness courtesy of indie artists such as the Marías, Buscabulla and Bomba Estéreo. He flits effortlessly between raucous party-starting and moments of wounded introversion, distilling all the divine drama of summer into 81 intoxicating, all-too-short minutes. SD 37 Wu-Lu – LoggerheadIn 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. Since they arrived six years ago, the Norwich duo have never been anything less than unique, moving from the insular teen lore of their 2016 debut I, Gemini to neon-bright proto-hyperpop on 2018’s I’m All Ears. Two Ribbons is their third landmark record in a row: a viscerally brave contemplation of loss, as Jenny Hollingworth faced the death of her boyfriend from cancer, and she and Rosa Walton found themselves helplessly drifting apart, bridged via ravey euphoria, startling honesty and an intriguing newfound foray into ambience. LS 28 Jenny Hval – Classic Objects 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. The series originally featured a globe on each album cover, to represent the world, as referred to in the album titles. When the Anthems...Ever! and the simply ...Ever! titles started to appear in 1997, the globe didn't usually appear on the cover. The globe continued to be featured on in the World...Ever! covers nonetheless, although in 2001–02, it started to become absent from the album covers of in the World...Ever! albums too, as it is absent from the Air Guitar covers and one of the Dance covers. In psychology, arrival fallacy describes the feeling of fulfilling a goal and yet still feeling disappointed. These are the underpinnings of Mitski’s sixth album, in which the Japanese American songwriter confronts the compromises her career has forced on her art and personhood – an album, no less, that she had no intention of making until she realised she still owed her label one more. These sound like inauspicious invitations to listen to Laurel Hell until you remember that – perhaps unfortunately for Mitski – her songwriting thrives amid this sort of conflict, between what we’re meant to want and what we truly want. Set primarily to the kind of tarnished 80s synth-pop the Weeknd would also explore on Dawn FM, Mitski charts the captivating battle between her weariness and drive, her rage and her discipline. LS 20 Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems

Volume 3 was released November 2003. Intended to be "the last Air guitar album in the world... ever!" according to the liner notes, there was later a "best of the best" album. Volume 3 featured a rare recording of the Pink Floyd song " Have a Cigar" by the Foo Fighters with Brian May. Queen's " Now I'm Here" also featured. The liner notes feature small quotes about each song/artist by May. Volumes 1 & 2 also did this, but focused mainly on the guitarist, rather than the song. Alongside New Rose, there was the irrepressible Neat Neat Neat and sinister beauties like I Fall, Born To Kill and So Messed Up. Feel The Pain alluded to illicit bouts of S&M, while Fan Club examined the wobbly lines between band worship and manipulation.

If The Clash never really disavowed White Riot, they also never recorded anything like it again. It split the audience and ultimately split the band too.