Avoid Freud by Rough Trade

Avoid Freud, the second album from Canadian new wave provocateurs Rough Trade, came out on True North in 1980, and it's the record where Carole Pope and multi-instrumentalist Kevan Staples dragged their brand of leather-and-bondage cabaret onto the charts. With Patricia Cullen on keyboards, Terry Wilkins on bass and Bucky Berger on drums, the band plays cool, sharp-edged new wave with Pope front and center.

The singles picked fights. The controversial "What's the Furor About the Führer?" came first, though its flip side, "Fashion Victim", did the real damage, reaching No. 3 on the RPM CanCon chart. Then came "High School Confidential", a song so frank about lesbian desire that Toronto's CHUM-FM paid for a cleaned-up recording; it went to No. 1 on the CanCon chart and became one of the first openly lesbian-themed Top 40 hits anywhere. The album went gold in Canada on March 1, 1981, and was platinum by June.

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