NOFX is a band that, based on where someone knows them from, can tell you a lot about that person. For some it was the Punk-O-Rama series, for that group of Asian kids from high school, it could have come from Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix 3. Some people may have just missed the whole boat entirely if they got into punk rock after the ages of 14. Since you’re the cool Aunt or Uncle now, and your nephew showed up to a family gathering in a Green Day shirt you need a crash course on all the NOFX albums you missed out on so you can impress them and exert dominance as the punkiest in the family.
15. Liberal Animation (1988)
This album may seem to be as far from NOFX’s sound today as it ever could. Long before Fat Mike dabbled with being vegetarian, long before NOFX had enjoyed any radio play, they were, by definition, 100% an ‘80s hardcore band. Like most ‘80s hardcore it has its time and place for older white dudes on their way to the podiatrist because they’ve only worn Vans and Doc Martens for three decades. The most coherent messages here are vegetarians are dumb, beer is good.
Play it Again: “No Problems”
Skip it: “Vegetarian Mumbo Jumbo”
14. Double Album (2022)
The second half of what was supposed to be a double album, and clearly the red-headed stepchild of the two is neither of the kids were wanted. If this is going to be the last studio album from NOFX it will be a stain on the legacy in the same way a freshly 21-year-old person gets a novelty bar shot with a chaser that is nasty and then follows it with a mat shot. It contains another song addressing an attempt at sobriety, and it hits harder than most of the other songs about Fat Mike trying to get sober because anyone who has gone to detox knows that those first few days feel like cake and then it crashes down about as hard as this album.
Play it Again: “Fuck Day Six”
Skip it: The rest of the album
13. Single Album (2021)
The first half of what was supposed to be the aforementioned double album. “Fuck Euphemism” is one of the strongest tracks for these releases, taking place at the Eagle, a legendary LGBTQ+ bar in San Francisco that hosts punk shows, and all 17 punks left in San Francisco who haven’t been priced out appreciate the nod. “Grieve Soto” is a masterclass in writing a song about losing a friend, but also a stern reminder of Exene of X and Penelope of the Avengers dropping hard Rs in their songs. The album contains one of the most self-referential songs to exist in the entire NOFX catalog, “Linewleum,” poking fun at the popularity of “Linoleum,” the countless covers of the song, Le Tigre, and like all great NOFX songs, pee drinking. The few standouts do not save the rest of the album.
Play it Again: “Grieve Soto”
Skip it: “Fish in a Gun Barrel”
12. So Long and Thanks For All The Shoes (1997)
Establishing that gatekeeping is a 24/7 job, and a necessary evil is an unpopular and hard thing to do, but who can be mad when it’s this catchy? This album is one of the least surprising, run-of-the-mill NOFX albums, but it’s still got everything a person could want. It has some catchy songs, some goofy puns, some fast songs with funny ska parts. If Fat Mike is your preacher, then this album is the sacrament bread you eat. You eat it not because it’s good on its own, but because of the community around it and the joy it brings you.
Play it Again: “All Outta Angst”
Skip it: “Champs-Élysées” (songs in French are very annoying)
11. Coaster (2009)
The vinyl version is called “Frisbee.” These two names may be the most honest album names to ever exist. Depending on which version of the album you got, there were some alternative tracks and takes on songs. It’s like Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red, you’ll need to buy both to catch them all. The covers are branded as being a coaster/frisbee with “Music Included” and The Hard Times has independently verified that the respective releases perform perfectly well.
Play it Again: “Creeping Out Sarah/Creeping Out Tegan”
Skip it: “I Am An Alcoholic” (we already know)
10. Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing (2006)
It may be hard to discern an overarching theme that ties “Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing” into a cohesive album, but it’s hard to say that the Mistress Bar in Roppongi isn’t on your must do in Tokyo list now. This album is all over the place, but not necessarily in a bad or overwhelming way, more like in a getting drunk and riding random bus lines and happening to just roll through into cool neighborhoods. Anti-Religious themes, politics, and poking fun at other bands are present, checking every single NOFX checkbox for an album. Apparently, there are multiple references to beef with Propagandhi on this album, which is rich especially when you consider Propagandhi is on Fat Wreck. Hopefully, everyone got to laugh it all the way to the bank!
Play it Again: “Leaving Jesusland”
Skip it: “100 Times Fuckeder”
9. Heavy Petting Zoo (1996)
What’s better than an album with timeless art that depicts a man fingering a sheep in front of a barn? There is also an alternative cover art depicting the same man with his pants down in a 69 position with a sheep. Is it the same sheep? Don’t sheep mate for life? Did this man have to fight a ram for the right to sexually indulge in the sheep? If this album isn’t a fan favorite, it fuckin’ should be. It’s equal parts adolescent humor, part addressing coming of age, while being vindictive to multiple groups of people, all while missing out on any other animal fucking puns outside of the title. Perhaps the animal fucking is an allusion to the image that Fat Mike presents in “The Black And White” when the image of Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin fucking each other is presented in song. Not content at only attacking cartoon-level scholars, the album goes after dead heads, a plague across San Francisco, and mocks the death of Jerry Garcia singing about what a great day his death was, even though Fat Mike got the date wrong. Fingers crossed we see hippies exterminated from San Francisco in the next decade or so, if you hate them, NOFX is here to let you know, you’re not alone.
Play it Again: “The Black & White”
Skip it: “What’s The Matter With Kids Today?”
8. White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean (1992)
Originally titled “White Trash, Two Kikes and a Spic,” the cover for this album reveals that Fat Mike is hardly fat, and in fact, he’s not even the fattest person in the band!. Arguably, this may be the first album where NOFX really begins to feel like NOFX and approaches the more poppy sound they’re known for. Most importantly this album taught many young punk men everything they decided they needed to know about lesbian relationships via “Liza and Louise.” Every fisting begins with a first kiss, the cardinal rule. Despite the name, the album hardly touches the subject of race in any way, possibly this is for the best.
Play it Again: “Liza and Louise”
Skip it: “Warm ”
7. Ribbed (1991)
This album is perfect if you need a community college version of Bad Religion. Instead of the commentary on humanity and American culture that Bad Religion effortlessly weaves into their music, NOFX does this by complaining about people who live in LA and how bathing once every 24 hours is too much. There are some catchy, vaguely political songs, and not for nothing, you won’t need a dictionary to understand the lyrics. Aside from how anyone feels about the album, it also has art you will never forget.
Play it Again: “Cheese/Where’s My Slice”
Skip it: “New Boobs”
6. Pump Up The Valuum (2000)
The last release on Epitaph, and you should play it loud. A valium drip is a great thing, if you’ve ever had one, you know this album was doomed to never be as good as the namesake. Any 14-year-old would love this album with timeless hits like “My Vagina,” “Dinosaurs Will Die,” and “What’s The Matter With Parents Today?” like seriously, it mentions vaginas in multiple songs. By this point in time, Fat Mike was probably rolling in the dough and still riding the high from “Punk In Drublic,” among some other substances probably. “Thank God it’s Monday” at face value of the song title may suggest it’s pro-rise and grind, but it’s really just about not having to work because you have sold a million copies of your biggest record. Must be nice!
Play it Again: “Louise”
Skip it: “Total Bummer”
5. Self / Entitled (2012)
This album is seen as a return to form after the prior effort, “Coaster” (or “Frisbee” if you purchased the 12”). Fat Mike takes on a handful of geo-political issues including terrorism, imperialism, secret societies, before getting deeply personal and ambiguous for the remainder of the album. The album starts off with a bang with “72 Hookers,” which depending on how you look at it, is just a punk version of the “love wins” slogan. Except remove the love part, and replace it with blowjobs as a way to stop extremists from detonating the vest. The strongest flex may come in “My Sycophant Others” where Fat Mike calls out the yes men and pee drinks around him. Self-referencing has always been a strong point of NOFX, if you recall “We Got Two Jealous Agains” from ‘The War on Errorism,” Mike dives into his divorce with “I’ve Got One Jealous Again, Again” which rings true for anyone who lost a long relationship and had to divvy up a mixed record collection. Seriously, never, ever mix record collections.
Play it Again: “Ronnie & Mags”
Skip it: “Down With The Ship”
4. S&M Airlines (1989)
This was NOFX’s first release on Epitaph records and features a dominatrix riding on top of an airplane as if it was a mechanical bull. Curious minds may enquire, is the dominatrix really big, or is the plane really small? Are there people inside the plane? Are they not worried about the massive scantily clad woman wielding a whip, straddling the vehicle they are in? “S&M Airlines” has a lot of references to travel especially the title track reads like a wet dream and may include the earliest (and only) reference to a rimjob in a punk song that features Greg Graffin and Brett Gurewitz doing harmonies. “You Drink, You Drive, You Spill,” while notably less horny than the title track, does touch on the dangers of sober driving citing statistics that show a majority of accidents are not alcohol-related. The result of a deep dive of this album, you may find yourself in a coach seat hopeful the stewardess is going to strap you in.
Play it Again: “Vanilla Sex”
Skip it: “Professional Crastination”
3. War on Errorism (2003)
America’s worst president, George W. Bush, clearly kicked up a lot of negative sentiment among punks and NOFX were the clear torchbearers in fighting him through music. For many kids born in the ‘90s, this album was their first that seriously took on politics, and it was released while they were simultaneously going through puberty, unfortunately it was also long before they reached voting age. To say this album was exclusively political couldn’t be further from the truth however. Breaking out of the duality of the two punk rock retirement plans, being a skinhead or a rockabilly guy (which is exclusively based on how bad they get hit by male pattern baldness), and suggesting that there is in fact a retirement community for old punks in “Mattersville”. The album closes on a somber note with “Whoops, I OD’d” and it’s strongly reminiscent of a time when you may have been in your teens and had to get your stomach pumped with your parents looking at you sideways.
Play it Again: “Anarchy Camp”
Skip it: None of it, you want to listen to this whole album
2. Punk In Drublic (1994)
The year is 1994, and just a few short months after Green Day released “Dookie,” “Punk In Drublic” is released. One can easily ascertain that this is NOFX’s most well-known, and commercially successful release without even looking it up. The album is fondly remembered as some of the band’s best work by people who still ride skateboards in their late 30s. Hooks aside, Fat Mike may subtly be foreshadowing the cultural zeitgeist of why people should rightfully be embarrassed for being white with “Don’t Call Me White,” still the foresight he had did not save him from releasing this on Fat Wreck over Epitaph. If you’re only going to get one NOFX album, this is probably the one you want.
Play it Again: “Lori Meyers”
Skip it: “Happy Guy”
1. First Ditch Effort (2016)
An oft-overlooked album in the NOFX catalog that captured a lot of the 2016 milieu surrounding the band. Seemingly Fat Mike makes attempts at sobriety, opens up about performing in drag, sings about STDs, and tackles drug use (okay every NOFX album tackles drug use but still). This may be the deepest, most personal NOFX album, and easily the biggest bummer of an album. Not being content with making you feel bad about your relationship with your parents, your drug use, the times you should have used a condom, it touches on the death of Tony Sly, hanging with a friend who has cancer, and the end of the world. Pour yourself a drink, you’ll need it.
Play it Again: “I’m a Transvest-Lite”
Skip it: “Generation Z” (It’s a great song, it’s just going to bum you out, so ignore it like we ignore global warming)
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Pig Lib”
Death Cab For Cutie “Transatlanticism”
The Postal Service “Give Up”
The White Stripes “Elephant”
The Strokes “Room on Fire”
The Unicorns “Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?”
The Shins “Chutes Too Narrow”
The Weakerthans “Reconstruction Site”
The Kills “Keep On Your Mean Side”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Fever to Tell”
Sufjan Stevens “Michigan”
The Rapture “Echoes”
Cat Power “You Are Free”
Kings of Leon “Youth and Young Manhood”
The Decemberists “Her Majesty”
Depeche Mode has often been dismissed as a cultural lightweight, alternatingly for producing mindless pop music or for melodramatically gloomy dirges. It’s pretty weird that the band decided to hit back against that image a full fourteen albums in, producing the politically strident, musically soporific “Spirit.” It’s as if this collection of millionaire goth rock stars were trying to outdo U2 in terms of earnest, Marxist-lite songs about climate change and the Arab Spring, only to somehow wind up even more embarrassing. We’re not saying Depeche Mode needs to stick to songs about weird sexual power dynamics, but if they wanted to get political, the time to do so was a long time before this.
By the 2000s, Depeche Mode’s new album release strategy had become pretty rote: the new collection of songs would be described as the most lyrically personal ever, while returning to their seductively dark analog roots. However, that doesn’t mean that said songs can’t be boring as fuck, like in the case of “Delta Machine,” an album saddled with a title that should rightfully belong to a knockoff Robert Ludlum novel. The band’s thirteenth album is pretty much the definition of resting on one’s laurels, with even the best tracks little but distant reminder of what heights DM can rise to when they’re bothered to.
It’s difficult not to read the shocking death of Andy Fletcher into “Memento Mori,” the album released after the longtime member (and reported peacemaker of the band) passed away due to a heart condition. But Depeche Mode has always been inclined to an absurd level of morbid introspection (or navel-gazing, depending on who you ask), so who’s to say how much that truly affected the album? At the very least, the addition of the Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler as a co-songwriter added some much-needed fresh blood to the mix, resulting in some of the band’s most energetic music in years.
Sometimes it’s easy to tell when a band is ready to cash in on accumulated fan appreciation and just try to recycle the hits. For Depeche Mode, that’s 2001’s “Exciter,” a tired-sounding album that saw the group semi-reusing title ideas like “Freelove” (see: “Strangelove”) and “The Sweetest Condition” (i.e., “The Sweetest Perfection Part 2”). This is a consummately professional album, in that its production sounds about as good as the band ever has and has very little under the hood.
While it’s not going to break the top ten list of any sane Depeche Mode fan, “Playing the Angel” at least sounds like Gore and Gahan weren’t actively falling asleep in the studio. After “Exciter,” we’d take anything we can get, which made the unexpectedly harsh noise blast of opener “A Pain I’m Used To” that much more exciting. Some of that likely has to do with Gahan being allowed to contribute songs for the first time, presumably having years of work stocked up for the day Gore stopped shoving him in a locker after vocals were recorded.
“Sounds of the Universe” picks up on the resurgent energy of “Playing the Angel” and takes it a step further, right down to the opening wave of discordant synth noise on the lead track “In Chains.” Pound for pound, it’s the strongest of Depeche Mode’s latter-day albums, with Gore and Gahan seeming like equals in the studios for perhaps the first time. In particular, the singer sounds in great form, even if someone should have told him that shouting “WRONG” over and over doesn’t constitute a catchy chorus.
Legendarily, when original bandleader Vince Clarke decided to piss off and start Yaz, the rest of Depeche Mode essentially shrugged and figured they didn’t really need the guy who wrote all the songs anyway. For a band of teenagers unexpectedly having to throw together a sophomore album on their lonesomes, “A Broken Frame” is shockingly strong. The darkness that would eventually become caricature seeps in here, but it’s also the work of a band not quite sure exactly what they’ll be yet.
“Ultra” came after Depeche Mode’s titanic commercial successes of the early 1990s, when they transformed from a popular but critically derided synth group to one of the biggest bands in the world. It also came after the departure of Alan Wilder and Gahan’s near-fatal heroin overdose, so it’s safe to say that these were some tumultuous times. It can’t be denied that the eerie groove of “It’s Not Good” is one of the best the band has ever produced, while “Home” sees one of Gore’s finest-ever vocal performances. The band might have been fucked up at the time, but they could still bring it in 1997.
By 1983, Depeche Mode was solidifying into the gloomy, infectiously dance behemoth it would become, and “Construction Time Again” is the proof. Alan Wilder joined the band, bringing in a new level of musical sophistication with his arrangments, while Gore’s songwriting leveled up significantly, particularly on the ridiculously catchy opener “Love, in Itself” and the anthemic “Everything Counts.” After the departure of Clarke, DM was getting weird with some of its experimental sounds, which would eventually lead to even greater gains, but not quite yet.
This standalone single is debatably their greatest and most representative work of the period, a perfect suspnesion of post-disco rhythm, Gore’s knack for synth hooks, and Gahan’s increasingly layered, seductive vocals. In other words, it fucking rocks.
“Songs of Faith and Devotion” is the sound of a band at the absolute peak of its powers, beginning to lose the plot. Despite Gahan’s increasing descent into addiction, the band’s sense of alienation from each other, and the risk of emerging alternative rock turning their synth-heavy sound passé, the songs on this album are some of the most powerful they’ve ever produced, from the gloomy balladry of “In Your Room” to the gospel-inflected “Condemnation” to the chilly hooks of “Walking in My Shoes.” They have pretty much never been quite this good again, but at least we got this before things got really bad for a while.
The only album to feature original Depeche Mode mastermind Vince Clarke (also the guy behind Yaz, Erasure, the Assembly, and that one song that goes duh-duh-duh-duh that you can’t get out of your head), “Speak & Spell” is a bit different from the rest. While the irrepressibly effervescent, immortal bop “Just Can’t Get Enough” essentially defines the sound of the original Depeche Mode, there’s enough edge to tracks like “Boys Say Go!” and “Nodisco” that the sharp turn into darkness ahead is not out of nowhere. C’mon, they already had a song called “I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead,” is it all that shocking they went goth?
We’ll admit this first, just to get it out of the way: the lyrics to “People Are People” are pretty fucking stupid; even Martin Gore says so. However, the music is as leanly muscular and undeniably catchy as anything the 1980s produced, as is the rest of the album. Try listening to the robotic call-and-response intro of “Master and Servant” and not be astounded by the sheer weirdness of the band at the time. Then sit back and enjoy, perv.
Okay, this is where Depeche Mode stopped fucking around and dived fully into the guilt-sex-drenched psychodrama that has defined the band ever since. “Black Celebration” is 11 tracks of unceasingly gripping melancholia and festering shame, but y’know, in a cool way. Songs like the chugging creep of “Stripped” and “Fly on the Windscreen – Final” are high points for the band, not just an album, while Gore took lead vocals on nearly half the tracks, including the heartbreaking insecurity ballad “A Question of Lust.” The band would make far bigger (both in terms of sales and in sheer sonic grandeur) albums, but never a better one.
“Music for the Masses” took everything Depeche Mode had done up to that point and cranked it up to 11, then said fuck it, and cranked it up even higher. The band’s sixth album is a massive step up in pretty much every way imaginable, which is especially impressive coming immediately after the triumph of “Black Celebration.” The darkness, the incredible pop hooks, the blend of guitar rock, industrial noise, and synth-pop; all hit a new peak on this album, with all the corresponding fame and success that comes along. Most importantly, Gore finally nailed how to write an anthem that would make a packed stadium sing along, the key part of any world-demolishing group of rock gods.
Very few bands get to make a completely perfect statement. For Depeche Mode, it’s “Violator,” the album they will forever (and correctly) known for. There’s really no way to describe the album other than the moment of every element of the band hitting full capacity at the same moment, and achieving a sound unlike anyone else. Nobody else was making something like the bizarre obsessive blues riff and electronic beat of “Personal Jesus” or the ineffable delicacy of “Waiting for the Night.” Nobody else created the insanely compelling intensity of “Halo” or “Policy of Truth,” let alone made their bruised, over-the-top emotionality somehow feel right and true. You think any other band could have made “Enjoy the Silence?” Don’t be silly.
