Best Ever
Rock Album?

The first thirty seconds of “Just Like Honey” are a lie. That drum machine, those chiming guitars—Ronnie Spector could walk in any moment. Then the fuzz arrives, not gradually, not politely, but like someone kicked over an amplifier in the next room, and you realize the Jesus and Mary Chain have been setting a trap. Psychocandy is a pop album that wants to hurt you, or maybe a noise album that wants to kiss you. Thirty-nine years later, the tension still hasn’t resolved.

That’s because resolving it was never the point.

Jim and William Reid grew up in East Kilbride, Scotland, hoarding Velvet Underground records and girl-group 45s, and Psychocandy is what happens when you refuse to choose between them. The melodies are immaculate—“You Trip Me Up” has a chorus Phil Spector would have killed for, “Cut Dead” swoons like early Roxy Music—but they’re buried under sheets of distortion that feel less like a production choice than a weather system. The feedback isn’t decoration. It’s a delivery mechanism.

Listen to “Never Understand” on headphones. The verse is pure bubblegum—handclaps, call-and-response vocals, a hook that lodges in your skull. But the guitars are doing something violent around the edges, harmonics piling up until the mix threatens to collapse. When the chorus hits, it’s euphoric and aggressive at once.

Your body doesn’t know whether to dance or flinch. That confusion is the album’s entire emotional vocabulary.

The drum machine deserves its own sentence. The Reids couldn’t afford a real drummer, so they used a cheap rhythm unit that sounds like cardboard boxes being struck in a hallway. It should be a limitation. Instead, it’s essential—that mechanical thump provides the only stable ground in a mix where everything else is sliding and smearing. Live drums would have smoothed the tension away. The machine keeps it taut.

What makes Psychocandy the best noise pop album isn’t the noise or the pop but what happens in the collision. The feedback isn’t ironic distance or art-school posturing. It’s amplification—genuine longing, frustration, desire too intense to express cleanly. “In a Hole” is a love song that sounds like a headache. “Taste of Cindy” is teenage lust rendered as beautiful damage. The noise doesn’t obscure the emotion. It’s how the emotion gets out.

My Bloody Valentine took this template and went further inward. Dinosaur Jr. added American sprawl. Slowdive softened the edges. Shoegaze, dream pop, noise rock—all of them trace a line back to two brothers who decided the Ronettes and Lou Reed belonged in the same song.

Put on “Sowing Seeds.” Let the haze of overdrive wash over you. Notice how the melody never quite surfaces completely, how you have to lean in to find it through the murk.

That’s the transaction Psychocandy offers. It won’t make this easy. But the difficulty is the point—because some feelings are too big for clean production, too raw for proper arrangements. The Reid brothers found the only container that could hold them: noise so dense it becomes shelter, pop so buried it becomes secret.

The gorgeous part was never hidden. It just needed the static to be heard.

The Jesus and Mary Chain: The Best Ever is feedback as a love language. Is Psychocandy the Best Ever Noise Pop Album? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• Start with the Deluxe Edition CD—the demos and B-sides reveal how deliberate the chaos was.
• Audiophiles swear by the 180-Gram Vinyl reissue to let the low end rumble the way it was meant to.