Adolescents by The Adolescents

Adolescents, the 1981 debut from Fullerton's the Adolescents, is the one everybody calls the Blue Album, thanks to its cover, and it came out on Frontier that April. The band had just added guitarist Rikk Agnew and drummer Casey Royer, and several of the songs came over from the Detours, their earlier band, including "Kids of the Black Hole" and "Amoeba", which turned into two of their best-known songs.

It's Orange County hardcore at its snottiest and catchiest: Rikk and Frank Agnew's guitars buzzing like a hornet's nest, Steve Soto's bass driving the charge, and choruses you can shout along to after one listen. It was one of the first hardcore punk records to get wide distribution across the US and it sold as well as just about any California hardcore record around at the time. And the band never even toured it: they broke up four months after it came out, leaving the record to do the talking.

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