The Raincoats – The Raincoats (vinyl album)

Released on 21 November 1979, “The Raincoats” is one of the defining debut albums of British post-punk and one of the earliest records issued by Rough Trade. Raw, inventive, and completely unconcerned with convention, it captures a band making something new out of instinct, experimentation, and DIY urgency.

Built from elastic rhythms, reedy vocals, violin scrapes, fractured melodies, and a fearless sense of space, the album sounds unlike almost anything around it at the time. The Raincoats drew from punk, folk, art rock, and improvisation, but the result was entirely their own: loose but precise, awkward in the best sense, intimate and quietly radical. The band’s egalitarian ethos and roots in late 1970s squat and DIY culture run right through the record, giving it a handmade energy that still feels startlingly alive.

Songs like “No Side to Fall In,” “Off Duty Trip,” “The Void,” and their brilliantly off-kilter take on “Lola” helped define a new language for post-punk, one less interested in polish than possibility. Critics and later musicians would come to recognise the album as a touchstone, not just for post-punk, but for generations of independent and DIY music that followed. It later earned major retrospective acclaim, and Kurt Cobain’s advocacy helped introduce it to a new audience when the album was reissued by Rough Trade in 1993.

This is not simply a great debut. It is a blueprint for artistic freedom: playful, resistant, emotionally sharp, and wholly original. A foundational record for anyone interested in punk beyond cliché, and a crucial companion to our interview with Ana da Silva.