The Dead Boys could easily have been one of the bands of their generation. Frontman Stiv Bators should have been punk’s poster boy. But, somewhere along the line, it all went wrong. No one owned up to writing the graffiti either: “I think it’s because they can’t spell ‘cunts’ right,” says bassist Michael Bradley. “Who would own up to that?” One of the greatest things about post-punk is the way that it makes intense bleakness danceable despite itself; and Leeds outfit Gang of Four were one of the earliest pioneers with their debut album ‘Entertainment!’. Sarcastic in title and biting by nature, it’s a record that sets out an urgent agenda with thumping drums: spanning from political violence in Northern Ireland to rampant consumerism. And Gang of Four’s politics often veer towards the personal: the likes of ‘5.45’ and ‘Contract’ nail the lingering sense of anxiety and dread that comes with a constant numbing bombardment of terrible news. “ Our bodies make us worry,” frontman Andy Gill sings cheerfully on the latter, atop spiking and uneasy dub-punk. Despair and disenfranchisement colliding with gold-standard pop writing – it doesn’t get much better than this. New Jersey trio the Ergs! went into recording their debut with low expectations: “We were just like, ‘Let’s make this thing, I guess,'” drummer-vocalist Mike Yannich, a.k.a. Mikey Erg, told Noisey. “There was no real thought process to it, just like, ‘Bands make albums, let’s make albums.'” Despite their lax attitude, the band ended up with an urgent, infectious pop-punk tour de force, the sort of album that makes you want to pogo jump while screaming about heartbreak. “I’m in love, I’m in trouble!” Erg yells on the aptly named “First Song Side One,” riffing on the Replacements and announcing a 16-song LP that lasts just 32 minutes. Along the way, Yannich & Co. touch on everything from hardcore to hip-hop and doo-wop (to say nothing of references to The Simpsons and Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van book). But the album never strays far from its speedy, melodic roots, helping to secure the band’s cult-fave status among the pop-punk faithful. P.V.

When I hear this record, I think, ‘This must be what electricity sounds like.’ The way Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played guitars together is so fascinating to me. A very influential band.” Why it was so influential: Gang of Four’s kid-in-a-sweet-shop approach to genre – snatching up elements of disco, funk and dub – didn’t just shape post-punk’s scattershot approach. ‘Entertainment! also influenced everything from rap to grunge: Kurt Cobain once said that Nirvana began as a partial rip-off of Gang of Four. Joy Division, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ (1979) In 1981 they released the brilliant Juju, and it signified a big change, not only in The Banshees’ sound but also in Britain’s culture entirely. The brazen and bratty side of punk had resided, and now there was something more artistic awaiting the group. With Steve Severin’s basslines and Siouxsie’s theatrical vocals, the move into something new was always likely to be a touch darker. The album managed to encapsulate everything that makes Television such an influence. Not only is their languid and effortless playing style given ample room to ruminate, but the unique and singular sound perfumes every rotation of the disc. Endlessly compared to their punk contemporaries, the world wasn’t ready for Television. Released on April 8 1994, The Offspring’s third studio album would herald pop-punk’s mainstream acceptance. Through the likes of The Offspring, Green Day and then Blink-182, it would become even bigger than grunge; the preceding underground music scene also swiftly commercialised.In the face of the onslaught of their imitators, it’s easy to forget what a breath of fresh air Bad Religion was in ’88. Suffer broke the brutal testosterone-infused chokehold of hardcore on punk and along the way introduced a new generation to the forgotten art of writing lyrics and melodies. It also didn’t hurt that Brett Gurewitz and Greg Graffin knew how to balance their rage with heavy doses of intellect and weren’t such tough guys that the thought of adding a little harmony into a tune didn’t fill them with mortal terror.

Legend goes that the boys were ready to release a single album that would follow in the tradition of their previous work. However, after hearing Husker Du’s double album Zen Arcade they reentered the studio so overflowing with creativity an entire second side was born. That scattershot mess of ideas ultimately serves as the perfect representation of what punk can and should be. Free from constraint, full color and grey, angry and joyous. Punk’s past, present, and future is all here. Great electric guitar tone. You know it when you hear it, and you’ll hear it all over Future Forecast, the first full-length album from Melbourne, Australia’s latest great band, Civic. Everything about Civic is no-frills; these are just plain punk songs, featuring hard-charging rhythms, bouncing bass lines, buzzsaw guitars, occasional saxophone and the ever-simmering, sneering vocal style of frontman Jim McCullough. Did we mention the guitars on this record? My goodness, they sound incredible through headphones. —Ben SalmonTraditionally dismissed by a derisory media, Sham 69 have been effectively excised from punk history. It’s not as if they didn’t sell records (a consecutive run of irresistibly hooked late-70s chart singles that left punk contemporaries such as The Clash, Damned and Jam choking on their dust) or become influential (the classic Sham template continues to define today’s street-punk). The truth is that Sham 69 were always just a little too uncomfortably authentic for an essentially middle-class, largely metropolitan music press. As Sham’s vocalist Jimmy Pursey so eloquently nailed it in his lyrics to their breakthrough Angels With Dirty Faces hit: ‘ We’re the people you don’t wanna know, we come from places you don’t wanna go.’ He continues, “Their first album, Unknown Pleasures, is an absolute masterpiece.” One can’t disagree either. It provided a sense of artistic evolution and the purity of art itself. It suggested a new avenue of the mainstream for us to explore by including a reem of bruising songs that captured the attention of everybody who heard it.

With a chequered, tragic history and ever-revolving line-up, Social Distortion released just seven albums in the space of 28 years, but quite appropriately, their most recent, 2011’s Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes was put out by the label whose stable of many bands they inspired: Epitaph. In spite of a co-frontman stint with the original line-up of The Heartbreakers, bass-toting, mannered vocalist Hell’s incarnation of the ‘punk’ sound had way more in common with Television – the band he’d formed with Tom Verlaine in ‘73 – than with the Dolls. Voidoids’ guitarist Robert Quine matched an edgy Verlaine precision with a brink-dwelling Velvets aggression. It was, at the time, a truly unique game-changer. In the years after their split, many have attempted to imitate Refused, but none have captured the wild energy of this album. So when the Swedes returned in 2012, to face audiences hundreds of times bigger than those they played to in 1998, it was a relief to find the fire, intelligence, passion and sheer energy was burning brighter than ever before. Refused, it turned out, weren’t quite as dead as they claimed. And this album still sounds like the future. The greatest punk album of all time was made by a band trying to escape punk. Not its intent, force or even attitude, but its implied restrictions and captivity by fundamentalists. The Clash had gently expanded their scope on their second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope, but on London Calling they blew everything apart: styles, dynamics, vantage point and subject matter.Sadly, the band imploded under a cloud of misbehaviour, violence and a sophomore album flop in 1979, and we never got to find out how great they really could have been. I don’t give a shit that Raw Power didn’t make our top spot: If punk is about spewing bile at musical norms, than this album is more punk than any release, by any band, will ever be. Raw Power is eight songs of the filthiest guitar-based music made by American musicians, in any genre. Christ, even “Gimme Danger,” a pop song in many ways, sounds menacing and eventually lapses into chaos. When Savages emerged in 2011, they came with their own mythology that felt ripped from another time; at early shows Jehnny Beth goaded crowds from inside a wooden cage and the band laid out their creative vision in a succinct manifesto. “If you are focused, you are harder to reach,” read the front of their debut album ‘Silence Yourself’. “If you are distracted, you are available.” And it was an ethos that informed every last note; brutal, industrial, rib-cage juddering post-punk without an ounce of bagginess. Undeniably the best-named band in history, the Dead Kennedys brought politics into American punk on this, their fast and furious debut. Equipped with a vox that claws its way under your skin, Jello Biafra heaped ridicule on the “father knows best” illusions of Reagan's America with an irony and incisiveness that was unfortunately lost on the legions of P.C. punks who followed in his wake. In all essential respects, X’s Los Angeles was not that different from the city Jim Morrison celebrated and damned in his work with the Doors. In fact, the Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, became X’s producer. ‘I thought Exene was the next step after Patti Smith,’ Manzarek told writer Richard Cromelin. ‘She takes it further than any woman has ever taken it.’”

Along with Strummer and Jake Burns, it was the moment that Weller became the Poet Laureate of council estate kids everywhere. It would be sacrilege for Sex Pistols not to appear in the upper region of this list. In fact, some out there will no doubt rebuke me for not having it in first position. Johnny Rotten and the gang weren’t the most talented musicians in the world, nor on this list, for that matter. However, credit must be paid to those who can lift a middle finger to the man and spur cultural upheaval with provocative hits like ‘God Save the Queen’. Darby Crash was the L.A. scene’s poster boy for the joys of self-annihilation, but then where would punk be without its share of ugly death? On this 1979, Joan Jett-produced album, which is catapulted into greatness by Pat Smear’s raging guitar, the ultimate casualty bawls and brays his way through desperately ravaged tunes like “Manimal” and “We Must Bleed,” making the need for writing a suicide note a year later utterly superfluous. John Lydon said Richard Hell had nothing to do with punk. He was wrong. Aside from The Ramones’ D-U-M-B exception to the rule, NYC’s CBGB-based version of punk was significantly more cerebral than its largely visceral McLaren encouraged UK counterpart, and Hell – poet, style icon, novelist, nihilist, perfectionist, arsonist – was its nearly man. He could (should) have been huge: broodingly handsome, literate, ambitious, it was Hell who pioneered the electrocuted crop punk hairstyle and first repurposed torn T-shirts with safety pins. It’s true that Idol couldn’t keep his predilection for pop under wraps for long – a fact adeptly displayed by Generation X becoming one of the first UK punk bands to appear on Top Of The Pops in late ‘77. Not long after, the band’s descent into obscurity began. Idol fixed his eyes on the bright lights and departed for the charts in 1979.

5 Seconds of Summer, ‘5 Seconds of Summer’ (2014)

It’s a chance encounter, to be sure: As Jello Biafra joined up with what would become Dead Kennedys in San Francisco, he and his new bandmates discovered he couldn’t play guitar. Instead, he would hum and sing what he thought the music should sound like behind his lyrics, and the players would build compositions from there. The results have punk’s anger, but there’s a particular chug in Klaus Flouride’s bass and twang in East Bay Ray’s guitar that set up rhythmic noise in songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” before crashing down around listeners’ ears come chorus time. Why it was so influential: Just listen to virtually any ’80s pop record that came out after ‘Dare’ to hear its hallmarks. Elastica, ‘Elastica’ (1995) Crass put out some truly great albums, and perhaps there is none greater in their catalogue than Penis Envy, an impassioned, HMV-banned, 30-minute anarcha-feminist rant that took aim at various facets of female oppression, and featured exclusively female vocals in the form of Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre. The album won the band a not-insignificant amount of good, old-fashioned tabloid outrage when they successfully managed to pull off a hoax offering a flexi disc single from the album to be given away free with teeny bopper magazine Loving, drumming them up a shit load of free press in the process. Few bands, punk or otherwise, have ever been so controversial. And, yes, they did split up in 1984.