Flipper – Generic Flipper

Flipper’s 1982 debut remains one of the most uncompromising statements to emerge from early San Francisco punk. Released on Subterranean Records, Generic Flipper rejected the era’s “faster-shorter-louder” arms race in favour of something heavier, slower and far more corrosive.

Recorded between 1980 and 1981, the album thrives on tension: Will Shatter’s molten bass and dual vocals with Bruce Loose, Ted Falconi’s scraping, glacial guitar and Steve DePace’s blunt, repetitive rhythms combine into a thick, confrontational mass. It’s playful and paranoid in equal measure, wilfully abrasive yet strangely hypnotic.

The lyrics cut deep. ‘Ever’ opens with stark existential dread, while ‘Sex Bomb’ stretches into an eight-minute churn of looping bass, saxophone and effects, pushing punk towards something closer to nihilistic art-rock.

Imitated endlessly by noise rock and sludge bands since, Generic Flipper still stands apart. Few matched its mix of acidic guitar, metallic low-end and deadpan, sardonically sharp writing. Decades on, it remains a benchmark for punk at its most stubborn and subversive.