Bad Religion - No Control (Remastered) (1989/2020) [Hi-Res]

"No Control" is one of the albums that helped bridge the band's more reckless earlier direction with their more focused (but just as pissed-off) '90s-era. The strength of such cuts as "Big Bang," "Automatic Man," the title track, and "I Want to Conquer the World." NO CONTROL is one of the bands best all-time albums and an archetypal blueprint for the genre. Bad Religion has been setting the standard for years; this album is yet another stone in the band?s long road to identity and style.

“'No Control' was a special record because it was our second chance to make a sophomore album, if you know what I mean,” Gurewitz tells me with a self-deprecating laugh. He’s calling from the Epitaph office in Silver Lake, situated in a house they’ve been in since long before the LA neighborhood was “cool.”

“After ‘Into The Unknown,’ which sort of sent the band into a tailspin, we were redeemed by ‘Suffer.’ So now we wanted to prove we could follow up something good with something equally good. We wanted to make a record that was better than ‘Suffer’: faster, catchier, like ‘Suffer’ on steroids; the opposite of what we had done from ‘How Could Hell…’ to ‘Into The Unknown.’ We set out to prove that we knew what was good about ourselves.”

Mission accomplished, because ‘No Control’ is a perfect punk album. Even now, ‘I Want To Conquer The World,’ ‘You’ (which would later be popularized even further by its appearance on video game 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2') and the album’s title track are never missing from a Bad Religion set list. ‘Change Of Ideas,’ ‘Big Bang,’ ‘Sanity’ and ‘Henchman’ are often rotated into a Bad Religion shows, too. None of the 15 classic songs ever hits the three-minute mark; ‘Change Of Ideas,’ which opens the album, and ‘I Want Something More’ are over before even one full minute has elapsed. Pure fury.