“Atomizer”, any day on the apocalyptic Big Black calendar

By Fabio Marco Ferragatta⋅ 1 January, 2026 Comment

First January 2026. What are you doing here, reading an article about a webzine? Are you glazing the hangover? The boredom? The drugs? Do you dislodge? You have a coffee? Really, explain it to me. Maybe an article about Big Black might be more interesting than filling the toilet with the dinner swallowed last night?

First January 1986. is this really the release date of “Atomizer ”? Many sites understand in terms of discs and related release dates They say just like that. There will have been open record stores, the January 1, 1986, in the United States? I have my serious doubts. But I ce I see them, Albini, Durango and Riley as they grown of taste taking the decision on the day of release of the debut on the long distance of one of the most obscene bands and daughtersdiputtana of those disgusting 80’s to the ends. The first day of the year. Why not? If we have to fail, we fail properly. Will the Homestead have put their hands in their hair? Or Gerard CosloyWill Gerard Cosloy have had a fat laugh?

What then Such a thing would never have failed, on the contrary. First week: three thousand copies sold. Three thousand copies sold of a record debut of a group that, in the same words of Steve Albini was born with the awareness of “making lousy and obscene music” which “was not for everyone.” A band that, for God, in a world of steroidal assholes in the ball for hardcore punk, so with muscles, instead of a drummer had a Roland drum machine TR-606 and this is because Steve loved formations like “ Suicide, Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire, Tuxedomoon and Metal Urbain ”, which made great use of this frosty machine that, for the trio, was a real component to all the effects, making it a quartet. Three thousand copies only in the first week, growing such that the Big Blacks were able to allow to say (or rather, to oblige, according to what says the indie expert of those years Michael Azerrad) to Cosloy of pay bands of friends otherwise they would have turned up their heels.

Three thousand copies in the first week of a record rightly defined by the legendary critic Robert Christgau as “a brutal guitar machine that thousands of cowardly teenagers heard in their heads.” And Christgau I think he didn’t even like Steve Albini’s way of putting himself in. Who could have liked it? To the three thousand people who bought that first edition of Atomizer“Atomizer”, and thousands of other assholes in the decades to come (me among them). A record that contained an involuntary hit like Kerosene, which opens with a distorted melody that seems anything but a guitar and that instead is, which seem like the first Killing Joke gone wrong, a crazy song that talks about the few things to do in a small American town at the time, that is, as Riley said, “blowing things up for fun and having sex with the only girl in the city who fucks with everyone”Set me on fire…Kerosene!.” Yet it works, Dave’s own bass is the new thing about Big Black (without taking anything away from Jeff Pezzati), it’s brutal, full, post-punk in a context all but post-punk.

An album which opens in the threatening way (sharp as the worst razor in circulation) and opprobrious possible, with Jordan, Minnesota, a song that speaks of child abuse and that in the liner notes of the disco is accompanied by a warning: “ You can’t think about it, really, because if you do it you get crazy, you stutter, you spit and you piss on like crazy, so you don’t think about it.” Don’t you think about it, you turn the other way pretending that America has (never been) the dream boasted by the worst assholes and, instead, the Big Black you They take their face in their hands and force you to look at everything the horror that lies in that dream, that survives also because you Don’t look. It was like that in 1986 and it’s also worth it in 2026, what do you think? AND Not in the States alone. The truth, however, will reveal it years later Albini himself admitting that all that affair that happened to Jordan nothing else was than a frame to bring down a hood of terror over the city and send some “poor son to jail” of a bitch.” This is also the shit that doesn’t stop happen in this world. A few years later “South Park” he dealt with the thing and, the solution, for the parents of the town was to have a wall built (Chinese) around the town. Protect yourself. Isolate. Trump knows something about it, lies and isolationism. 1986-2026.

The greed of the human being embodied in a corrupt cop, who will take back the Swans (perhaps the only band that at the time could equalize the Big Black disaster) the same year with their album Greed“Greed”, shouts from the big wind Big Money: “We just want, we just need big money”. Fists of Love is dangerous, today it could not be acceptable, but it is about consensual sadism, voluntary darkness, and it does so in a sly, dirty way, it is the song you willingly put on while you are fucking. The alcoholism that causes you to rot, Stinking Drunk expands in the dark and devours it, “go, get drunk” and “ shut up! .” And that darkness that permeates each of us that makes us speak, “I hate myself for my weakness, my past sickens me” that becomes body in Bad Houses (i.e. the closed houses frequented by the protagonist of the piece), which slips slow, bitter, destructive.

This is Atomizer“Atomizer”: a handbook of human failure. A disassembly chain of a failed company. The icy sound of a world in unraveling that in forty years has not yet stopped falling apart. It is right to listen to it again for the umpteenth time on January 1st. The beginning is nothing but any day in this eternal apocalypse.