The Cramps’ Iconic Debut Album Gets Vinyl Reissue

Songs The Lord Taught Us, the classic debut album from psychobilly pioneers The Cramps, is getting a new LP run on black and purple marbled vinyl. The reissue is due out in a limited edition pressing on October 25, just in time for Halloween. Due to the custom dye process, no two copies of the record will look exactly the same; each one will be a completely unique artifact.

The Cramps released Songs The Lord Taught Us in 1980 after years spent developing their highly influential sound. Eventual spouses Lux Interior and Poison Ivy formed the band in 1972 in Sacramento, then spent two years in Interior’s hometown of Akron before settling into New York’s burgeoning punk scene in the mid-1970s. In NYC, the Cramps became fixtures at Manhattan punk clubs like CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, building up a reputation as one of the wildest, most unique punk bands in town.

The Cramps’ music brought together rockabilly, garage rock, blues, punk, and glammed-out horror iconography into a new style that came to be known as psychobilly. On Songs The Lord Taught Us, they filtered the raw, rowdy, and lascivious sounds of rock ‘n’ roll’s formative years through the lens of the rising punk movement, setting a template that has proven to be massively influential across the underground for decades.

“They made sexy music for people who didn’t buy mainstream sex appeal, peering back at ’50s rockabilly and R&B through a big, dirty punk magnifying glass,” wrote Pitchfork in a 2020 retrospective. Upon the album’s original release, Robot A. Hull wrote in Creem, “It unleashes a noise so loud, so uncontrolled, so jittering and shivering with the nightmares of a thousand-and-one restless nights, that one may be moved to run in panic, switch on the lights, and cower in the nearest closet.”

Order The Cramps’ Songs The Lord Taught Us now.