Love Stinks by J. Geils Band

Love Stinks, the J. Geils Band's ninth studio album, came out on EMI on January 28, 1980, and it catches the Massachusetts barroom brawlers mid-makeover. The R&B-soaked blues rock that built their name is still in the bones, but the edges are sharper and the keyboards shinier as they edge toward the new wave sound that would carry them to their commercial peak on Freeze Frame.

Peter Wolf still yowls, Magic Dick's harmonica still wails, and Seth Justman, who wrote most of the band's songs with Wolf, gives the tunes a punchy pop snap. The title track is the one everybody knows: a gleeful, stomping rant about unrequited love that climbed to number 38 and has been showing up in films ever since, covered by Joan Jett in Mr. Wrong and by Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer.

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