I'll second Pearl Jam's "Ten" - one of the best front-to-back debut albums I've ever heard from a song quality perspective - Hendrix, and may of the other usual suspects.
I would also add: Norah Jones "Come Away With Me". Gn'R "Appetite For Destruction".
Agree with OP that Can’t Buy a Thrill is a top debut. One could argue that the Dan’s first two are also contenders for the best opening two. My favorite is R.E.M.’s Murmur but it is hard to argue with Are You Experienced and Led Zeppelin. And then there’s the game changers...Never Mind the Bollocks and PJ’s Ten.
Nobody's mentioned Eddie Moneys self titled first album. The one with Two Tickets to Paradise and Baby Hold On. The entire album was worth listening, and we played the heck out of it. Not up there with Bostons debut, but noteworthy
Completely agree with your pick of Steely Dan “Cant Buy a Thrill” ( 1972) . A faint echo : “ Bad Company “ ( 1974 ?) was pretty solid for a debut album. Good thread here.
Great mentions already, here's a few more. ZZTop/ZZ Tops First A!bum, Steve Earle/Guitar Town, J Geils/S/T, Elvis Costello/My Aim Is True, Joe Jackson/Look Sharp. Enjoy the music
"As much as I loved the Sex Pistols, they were too much of a one trick pony. I still regret, though, that I missed them when they played the Roxy (or was it the Whisky?). I went to buy a ticket. They had already sold out....not the Pistols themselves, though!"
No, they didn’t, not even given the odd butter commercial.
As for them being a one trick pony, I doubt whether they were given any room to develop. Not with crazy media scrum that followed them everywhere this side of the pond.
Nor for the mayhem that later happened on the other side, the infamously notorious US tour of early 78 which broke the band. Details only gradually emerged some time later in our music papers.
For some of us, that sense of losing something we never really understood was strong. All of a sudden things began to return to drab late 70s normality...
As much as I loved the Sex Pistols, they were too much of a one trick pony. I still regret, though, that I missed them when they played the Roxy (or was it the Whisky?). I went to buy a ticket. They had already sold out....not the Pistols themselves, though!
This album single handedly got me out of pop music and into the more intricate type of music. I have been a huge PF fan ever since, for 53 years and counting.
Possibly the most eagerly anticipated, the most explosive, the most iconoclastic album in my memory was Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols.
I think all the songs have stood the test of time well, but to really ’get it’ you had to be following the music scene here in the UK in 76/77.
Their social impact was immense and the fallout had an after-life lasting decades. They made the Stones look like a bunch of naughty chartered accountants.
Their manager Malcolm McLaren might have thought he was orchestrating some kind of retro Rock N Roll experiment but soon found himself way out of his depth. As a direct consequence the unfortunate band members Lydon, Matlock, Cook and especially Steve Jones spent years of living through post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sid Vicious, bassist and figurehead, didn’t even make it that far.
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