1000 Hurts by Shellac

1000 Hurts, Shellac's third studio album, came out on Touch and Go on August 8, 2000, and the band's own sales pitch summed it up: the new one had no 12-minute songs, a nastier attitude and a turn at the mic for drummer Todd Trainer. Steve Albini produced, as ever, with Bob Weston on bass, and the whole thing is a love letter to analog tape. The sleeve mimics an old Ampex tape box, the record opens with a spoken bit modeled on the calibration tapes used to line up tape machines, and the title is a pun on 1000 Hz, a sine wave cycling 1,000 times a second.

The music is as lean and vicious as advertised, riffs that jab like a boxer and drums that crack like rifle shots. "Prayer to God" is the one the countdowns picked up. Rockfeedback later named it the record of the decade, and Savages' Jehnny Beth has said it made her want to play bass.

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