Hold Your Colour by Pendulum

Hold Your Colour, Pendulum's debut album, came out on Breakbeat Kaos on 25 July 2005, and it's the sound of three guys from Perth, Rob Swire, Gareth McGrillen and Paul "El Hornet" Harding, taking drum and bass and cranking it up to stadium size. Stuart Hawkes mastered it at Metropolis in London, and the guest list is long: DJs Fresh and TC, MCs $pyda and Fats, singers from Freestylers and Halogen, guitarists from Karnivool and Concord Dawn, and Peredur ap Gwynedd, who would later join the band.

It's still mostly drum and bass, but with a hard rock heart: breakbeats hitting like double-kick drums, synths snarling like distorted guitars, and Swire's vocals pushing the tracks toward proper songs. "Tarantula" is the monster, a rolling, rib-rattling beast built for the biggest system in the room. Critics liked it, and it was reissued in 2007 before In Silico pushed further into rock.

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