White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground

White Light/White Heat, the Velvet Underground's second album, came out on Verve on January 30, 1968, and it plays like the band kicked the studio door off its hinges on the way in. Lou Reed had fired Andy Warhol, who had produced the debut, so Tom Wilson took the controls with Gary Kellgren engineering, and the group simply set up and played the way they did on stage: loud, improvised and shoved through their new Vox gear until everything smeared into distortion. Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker cut it fast, and it comes out compressed, blistering and gleefully ugly.

Reed's songs deal in sex, amphetamines and drag queens, with Burroughs in the wings and Ornette Coleman's free jazz in the blood, and "The Gift" and the 17-minute "Sister Ray" play like dispatches from a very long night. It stalled at 199 on the Billboard chart, and it was Cale's last Velvets record; Reed had him fired later that year. Punk, shoegaze and noise rock were all listening.

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