Nu-Clear Sounds by Ash

Nu-Clear Sounds, the second studio album from Northern Ireland's Ash, arrived on 5 October 1998 through Infectious and Home Grown, and it's the sound of a band deliberately roughing itself up. After the success of 1977, the Downpatrick trio of Tim Wheeler, Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray added Charlotte Hatherley on guitar, wrote at a farmhouse, then decamped to Rockfield Studios in Wales, with more sessions at the Astoria in London. The band produced alongside Chris Kimsey and Owen Morris.

The touchstones were the New York Dolls, the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground, and it shows in the grimy garage-rock snarl. "Jesus Says" and "Wildsurf" both went top 20 in the UK, and the album itself reached number seven and went gold. Critics split between praising the playing and calling it uneven. The American edition came a year later with a reshuffled track list and three Butch Vig remixes.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.