STORIES of excitedly acquiring a brand-new record by an act you were HEAVILY invested in

You're wildly, obsessively into some artist. You have every scrap of their work practically committed to memory. Now you're racing all kid-on-Christmas to finally get your hands on fresh new material. (You are possibly a teenager and this new material possibly matters to you more than is wise.) I'd love to hear:

1. Your first/earliest instances of this experience, and how they turned out
2. Your most memorable cases, from the mindblowing to the comically disappointing or bewildering
3. Times you watched someone else experience a fascinating version of this
4. How often you find yourself having that high level of anticipation/investment today
5. Miscellaneous

god tier thread. i have a few relevant recollections. will be back later to talk about 27 august 1996.

In Feb. 2000, I was living in Redding, CA, and was a big Yo La Tengo fan after the knockouts of Painful and ICHTHBAO. Redding was pretty barren as far as record stores iirc and the few existing stores didn't have And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, so one Saturday I drove down to Chico, figuring I could find a copy in a college town. About a 70 minute drive, not just a quick hop to the next town over. I went to the Sierra Nevada brewery and had a nice lunch and good beers, stopped at a farmers market downtown and wandered around. One place was selling local honey, and I tried a few samples and bought a pint. There was some sort of allergen in one of the samples, and suddenly I was a mucus bomb, nonstop sneezing and nonstop snot. Luckily I wasn't having the sort of reaction that closed up my throat and airways. I got some napkins from someone but went through them pretty fast. I made my snotty way to the record store I was looking for, and asked for the CD between sneezes and wiping my nose on my sleeve. Luckily they had two copies and the trip wasn't in vain. I had the CD on in the car on the drive home, but couldn't really pay attention to it from the sneezing, snotting and watering eyes. I used my overshirt (plaid flannel of course) as a big snot rag on the drive home and it was pretty wet by the time I got home.

That was the only time I ever physically chased down a new release by an artist I was into. (I did mail-order Zappa's Old Masters Box 1 in 1985 for $100, when I was newly married and $100 was a huge expenditure.)

• The very earliest ones I can remember are unremarkable (second Sundays album and "last" Pixies album both delivered fine).
• I do think often about running out to get Blur's "Great Escape," putting it on, and near-instantly realizing I'd moved on from that whole type of thing and started leaning more toward American indierock/underground stuff. I think there's a bit in Hua Hsu's "Stay True" where he describes having basically the same experience with that release at the same age.
• Possibly the most satisfied I've been was with Broadcast? After two and a half years of playing the "Work & Non-Work" collection to death, spotting a new single and hearing "Echo's Answer" felt like a gold standard for The New Stuff Is Amazing," later sort of repeated by "Tender Buttons."
• (Or honestly maybe Ween's "The Mollusk," which if you were into Ween in the right way at that moment was a pretty glorious first listen.)
• At this point I rarely have the bandwidth to reach the level of completism and investment this requires but I'm basically there with Dry Cleaning and Richard Dawson, and probably would be with Zach Phillips stuff if there weren't so, so much of it.

On September 11, 2001, I had been a huge Dylan fan for six years or so and my plan was to buy the new album that afternoon after I got back from court in the city. As a new attorney, I had been working for about a month in the NY metro area and that day was only the second or third time I had been to court by myself. I commuted into Brooklyn via LIRR early that morning as I did not really know the way. Standing out on Adams St. before the court opened, I heard a bunch of sirens and fire engines started screaming past me, but I didn't pay much attention. It's NYC, right? I walked to the court building and was waiting for my conference to be called on the calendar. After a short time, an attorney came in and said "a plane" had hit the WTC. There was some chatter in the court room but no one really seemed to pay it much of a mind as it sounded like an accident and the size of the plane was not clear. A couple of minutes later, another attorney came in and said that a second plane had hit the WTC and that it was a suspected terrorist attack. The court officer announced that they would be giving adjournments to anyone that wanted one, which was highly unusual as the court usually was reluctant to grant adjournments. Most of the courtroom of maybe 20-30 attorneys got adjournments and cleared out. I didn't know what to do. I waited another five minutes in the mostly empty courtroom of nervous, subdued voices trying to figure out whether to leave or not. Finally, I said to myself, "You need to get out of here". I got an adjournment, walked quickly to the Atlantic Avenue station, and bought a paper LIRR ticket at 10:22am, which I still have. When I got down to the track level, the conductors were out on the platform yelling at people not to worry about tickets and just get on the train as the transit system was shutting down. I jumped on the packed train. The ride back was long and surreal as the train made every stop on the way regardless of the actual schedule. One person had a radio and earpiece and there were intermittent updates like the collapse of the towers, the Pentagon being "destroyed", and a reported carbomb at the White House. Some people on the train had been in or near the towers when the plane(s) had hit and jumped on a train right away. I clearly remember one of these people breaking down in tears. I tried to call my fiancé, now wife, dozens of times on my cell phone but could not get service. After about two hours, we reached my stop and I got off and walked to my fiancé's office. It wasn't until I got there and went up to the third floor conference room after 1pm that I finally saw the now famous footage of the towers burning and falling. I think I was in a bit of shock, especially being brand new to the area. It was overwhelming. After a while, I went to pickup my car and drove to my office, which was in the process of closing down for the day. I dropped off my files and drove to the Border's Bookstore in Westbury to buy Love & Theft. I still remember the bright, still summer light streaming in our bedroom windows that afternoon as I played it for the first time.

 Possibly the most satisfied I've been was with Broadcast? After two and a half years of playing the "Work & Non-Work" collection to death, spotting a new single and hearing "Echo's Answer" felt like a gold standard for The New Stuff Is Amazing," later sort of repeated by "Tender Buttons."

Nice, will respond in full later but 'ha ha sound' was actually one of the first things I thought of myself.

(rural american south - 1980s)

Poring over mail order catalogs/inserts with microscopic print (or back-page ads in months/years old fanzines) to half-remember some record someone's older brother/sister had told you about, or for records that had been described in the most alluring adjectives, then blindly sending mail orders (including S&H) to addresses in the UK, Japan, Germany & Belgium hoping that the records were still in print and then being surprised by a parcel months later when you'd given up hope and forgotten about it.

I scored my first SMiLE boot in that manner (sea of tunes out of either Hungary or Japan at that point?).

When I finally moved to civilization and encountered a major west coast chain with an import section, I couldn't believe how unfair I'd had it lol.

It's weird because I'd had the David Leaf book at that point (California Myth) and I'd heard the songs that had made it out of the SMiLE sessions and onto later albums, but not the entire piece as someone, not Brian but maybe Dom Priore?, had intended to sequence the source material into a rough concept album.

oo that bob dylan story is choice.

i think i did a midnight release thing with my friend for radiohead amnesiac? lol that i can't even remember. my memory sucks so bad now.

my most recent example of this is from this year. it's kind of all out of order, which seems befitting for how i discover everything now. king gizzard and the lizard wizard released phantom island in may. after a year or so of leaving them aside because i was listening to and djing club pop, and then having lost the gig earlier in the year, i went all in on the new album. listened to it a million times. i had missed flight b741 which came out last year. i bought it on bandcamp and put it on my iphone on 7/3 and then the following morning i got real baked and went for a run to it. oh my GOD it was just the best ever. a few weeks later i went by myself to capitol reef national park in utah for a few days and i must have listened to the album 10 times at least. i'll always associate it with trail runs in the sun ;_;

Much, much later I was able to catch the Brian Wilson & Wondermints performance and it was the climax of decades of studying and compiling and A/B-ing endless studio sources, a feeling akin to being one of the first tourists of Atlantis.

The first album that I remember being excited about buying on release day was Synchronicity. June 17, 1983. I was 13, in the final weeks of 8th grade. I'd adopted the Police as my first "favorite band" a few years before, and I'd been excited to see them continue to get bigger and bigger. "Every Breath You Take" was already out, of course, and that had just ramped up the hype even more. After school I got my dad to drive me to the nearest record store (Fantasy Records), and I studied the album cover with all its photos carefully all the way home. I loved it, not surprisingly, even though by this point it's probably my least-favorite and least-listened-to Police album.

There have been a lot more over the years, more than I can remember I'm sure. Darklands by JAMC, when I was in college, which exceeded expectations. Don't Tell a Soul by the Replacements, also in college, which did not exceed expectations.

My oldest child, now 21, has for years now made a habit of the modern version of this, which is staying up til midnight to stream or download something on release day. I think the last time I did that on purpose (as opposed to just finding myself up after midnight and realizing an album was out) was Taylor Swift's folklore. Which I really loved and which felt like kind of a gift in the COVID year. It was fun to listen to it knowing that millions of people were doing the same, and tracking some of the social media as we all absorbed it together.

The first one for me was Surrender by The Chemical Brothers. I was 13 and this was the first band I really dug. I actually remember being on a bunch of mailing lists at the time full of British ravers and the impression I'd got was it wasn't so good. I think they were actually emailing out individual tracks in MP3 form and if you were savvy you could hear the whole album. I was fine waiting though. Anyway a lot of grouching about how they abandoned Big Beat and went all commercial (???). That said I suspected they were wrong because they were piling on "Hey Boy Hey Girl" and I thought like, come on guys, obviously this is supposed to be funny. And it still is!

I also remember catching the "Let Forever Be" video during summer break...back then certain videos might've aired just once and then you wouldn't have a way of seeing them again! Sucks when the video is such a headfuck!!

Anyway, the day it came out I think it was a Saturday? Did my paper route and biked straight to the store. Then took a long ride back to listen to the whole thing on my Walkman. I loved it straight away. Save for maybe "Under the Influence" which just sounded annoying as shit. But when "Out of Control" came on, especially that guitar solo, I was like...this is amazing, who wouldn't like this???

I grew out of the Chems pretty quickly after that. I actually didn't care much when Come With Us came out...but out of curiosity I downloaded the title track. I put it on a CD-R and listened for the first time in my first car, which I'd just put a subwoofer in. Suffice to say, that was an experience. Funny I was so into this group only having listened to them on a boombox and $10 headphones.

I also recall a lot of the early takes on the album being "why listen to this when you could listen to that instead" but I'd never heard any of *that*. I'd read so much about how Let Forever Be was just a Tomorrow Never Knows ripoff I was kind of disappointed hearing the original...I mean its great obv but I like Let Forever Be more

the very first album i excitedly rushed out to buy on release day was Zooropa by U2, at the nearest record store (about 15 miles away.) It was the first of many of theirs i ran out to get on the day it came out, though after the '90s and they moved towards much more conservative sounds, the possibility that they'd do something truly unexpected evaporated.

my favourite memory of this is after our high school graduation assembly, dozens of kids streaming across the playing field to their cars so we could drive to the local shopping centre and buy Use Your Illusion

i remember buying Give Out But Don’t Give Out on day of release - Primal Scream were my fave band at that moment but I already knew I would be disappointed and I was… I got a cool long-sleeve t-shirt though

Probably most recently I went to a brick and mortar store to buy Blackstar on day of release and did a proper lights off full focus listen that evening - gave it a second listen in my car that sunday and remember whooping with delight that Bowie was still around and still making such fantastic music

as i think about it, i probably bought Adrenalize by Def Leppard as soon as it came out as well. that was a tough day.

i remember being very very excited every time i went to the store to get a new album when i was young. ones that stand out to me:

blue sky mining -- midnight oil (loved it)
out of time - REM (mixed feelings at first, then loved it, still remember being in the parking lot at Acme when i first listened to "Radio Song" -- the world is collapsing around our ears, i turned on the radio...it felt surreal at the time.)
rid of me - pj harvey (loved it)
alien lanes - GBV (loved it)
14 songs - paul westerberg (half corny, half good, enduring sentimental love for "runaway wind" bc i was not blowing like the breeze i was born to be)
achtung baby - U2 (mixed feelings, loved the gloomy songs though)

i don't have stories -- i could embellish and go on but i don't feel like it

1984, I was 16 or so. I'd been following the British prog revival scene ever since reading about the "Arrive Alive" live cassette release by Pallas in Kerrang! a couple of years before. This scene was Marillion, IQ, Twelfth Night and a few others - bands cribbing from early Genesis, Camel, Yes, Rush etc when no-one else was daring to do anything that unfashionable. In retrospect it mostly wasn't too great, but as a hugely uncool teenager it was the ultimate.

Marillion had a surprising amount of success, therefore some of the other bands from the scene were picked up by majors. Pallas had promised a double concept album based on the Atlantis myth, so you can imagine how excited I was. When it finally appeared it'd been slimmed down to a single LP BUT the cover art was by fantasy painter Patrick Woodroffe - he of the Dave Greenslade book/LP collaboration "The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony", lol - AND the producer was Yes engineer Eddie Offord. How could this be anything less than the greatest album of all time?

I purchased it from the long-gone Harum Records in Crouch End (probably for £3.99) and walked home with shaking fingers, sneaking a peek at the cover art on the way as I could barely wait. Once home I slid the record from the (gatefold) sleeve, placed it reverently onto the turntable and...oh. This doesn't sound very good. In fact it sounds shit. Maybe they should have got a proper producer in? And included more songs about Atlantis? I was truly crushed.

Predictable it sold about 10 copies and the band were dropped after their subsequent album failed to shift any more even though they were trying to sound like Go West by then. Marillion brought out Misplaced Childhood the following year but by 1986 I was listening to Big Black and Foetus and the prog revival all seemed like a bad idea. Sorry, Pallas.

Pallas had promised a double concept album based on the Atlantis myth, so you can imagine how excited I was.

lol love this

The first time I experienced this was definitely Metallica's Load, lol. I remember hearing an incredibly low-quality live bootleg clip of 2x4 (I could swear it was an mp2), and it actually sounded really crazy and brutal because of the terrible recording + digital distortion + low-res encoding.

Rock radio was playing Until It Sleeps *constantly*, like on the hour at least. And it was weird enough to be intriguing. But after that came disappointment followed by Herculean amounts of cope, and then disappointment (although that run from Until It Sleeps to Hero of the Day is still great). And a feeling that I'd missing the golden age that would become very familiar.

hah I've heard the Pallas album, I know it's got fans but yes I had the same reaction, "it sounds like shit"

Marillion's Misplaced Childhood and Clutching at Straws must've been cool to hear at the time though. along with those early IQ albums. a lot of that scene was pretty bad though. and that's coming from me. I'm still stunned to find out bands like Pendragon have a sizeable following.

I mostly remember getting albums by artists I really liked, being disappointed, and then experiencing the added disappointment of learning that you can be let down by bands that made albums you love, and newer is not better. Nimrod by Green Day might be the earliest example of that, along with Surrender by the Chemical Bros and, later, Summer Sun by Yo La Tengo (I like that this overlaps with some other posts above)

Otherwise, it’s Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail to the Thief. HttT stands out because I intentionally abstained from listening to leaks, which feels consequential because to this day I don’t listen to full albums until I acquire a physical copy.

I went to a weird mall across town, just ‘cause.

Skipped school with a friend to buy Odelay on release day. We were the only two Beck fans in our high school and we were obsessed with him. Between the two of us we had almost everything he had recorded up to that point, including the rare 10" with the fingerpainting and a cassette dub of Golden Feelings. Chris (my friend) was in charge of scooping up all the compilations Beck was on (Rare on Air, DGC Rarities, Jabberjaw comp, etc), and we'd trade tapes. It was really fun.

We showed up before the mall opened because we had to create the ruse that we were leaving for school that morning, so it was like 8am when we arrived.

I guess I'm one of those odd people who dislikes Odelay. I found it very disappointing then, and that opinion hasn't changed over the past 30 (!!) years, sadly. I might like it more if I heard it today for the first time, but I'm not sure. tbf my friend and I were definitely partial to Beck's fried folkie stuff, and Odelay sounded "overproduced" to us (we probably didn't use that word) and like the Beastie Boys or something.

Chris seemed to like the album more than I did, but I also got the feeling he was just trying to rationalize his purchase. $15 was a lot of money back then!

June 1986 I think. I went to a store and bought almost-brand-new albums by Test Dept (The Unacceptable Face Of Freedom, released in March) and Swans (Greed, released in Late February). I was a happy little industrial kid that day! I also bought PIL's This Is What You Want which I had never heard, but I bought it cold since I loved the 1st 3. I hated it so much I took it back to the store for credit that same day.

it was not what you wanted

first time cure - disintegration, drove to Brighton to buy it and got the cassette as well as the CD cos I didn't want to have to wait til I got home to hear it, started the tape then started the car began making my way to the exit then re parked the car because I decided plain song was too amazing to drive to and I wanted to be still while I listened.

last time - wu tang forever.

Legendary Pink Dots, 1992 - Shadow Weaver crushed me, The Maria Dimension had been so incredible and with the new one it just felt like treading water (plus I think their guitarist had just died unexpectedly after the last album). I remember being so bummed out and whining to my girlfriend, as per Paul's post $15 was a lot of money for a CD. Fortunately the band recovered and the next one (Malachai) was pretty great again.

mh otm, lol

I forgot to mention that the Pallas album was called "The Sentinel", obv. for Atlantean reasons. I think they may have finally released the full double album version as originally intended but too little too late for me.

i was never bent on getting the new album at midnight or whatever -- they next day or two would do fine

however getting concert tickets, in the 80s, as a teenager who couldn't drive was a much more fraught experience, involving permissions and parental drives to suburban malls and shit

i was in montreal when achtung baby came out and had friends who did go get it at midnight and were somewhat nonplussed at first

closest i came to this personally was my struggles to acquire the archers of loaf 'vs. the greatest of all time' ep in 1994. i was working at a borders store in alaska; they couldn't successfully order it. i went to independent elephant records; they couldn't either. alias records sucked so hard that i had to call up a store in north carolina and have them mail it to me.

Pearl Jam Vitalogy is definitely what first comes to mind. No big story but I can still picture the Sam Goody-type chain store in the soulless mall where I bought it, with bright fluorescent lighting, t-shirts, big 24x36 posters in those hard plastic pages to leaf through in the back. I remember being entranced by the book-type packaging (which I would later come to loathe due to its irregular sizing for storage - guessing I’m not alone there), and then repeated listens trying to make sense of the odder tracks like “Bugs.” Definitely lots of poring over the lyrics, which are inconsistently accurate/complete and presented in inscrutable ways, as was their MO at the time of never making anything easy for their public. I still love the record and can’t really listen to it with any kind of a critical ear

Fall of 1992 a friend lent me the Too Pure Peel Sessions cd with PJ Harvey, Th’ Faith Healers, and Stereolab. All great but fell hard for the lab’s four tracks and bought Switched On and then Peng. Every song was a hit to 19 year old ears. Low Fi ep over Christmas break, and then John Cage Bubblegum and Space Age Batchelor in the spring. Heard on summer break that they were putting out a double album on a major label. ??? Driving around right before school starts back up for the fall listening to WPRB from NJ and someone plays “Golden Ball” from a 7” Elektra put out. Just in a trance. Next day (I think) I drove down to 3rd Street Jazz and Rock (RIP) and there was the Jenny Ondioline 10” with four new songs. I think I got Transient very shortly after but just playing those 4 ep songs over and over for a week or two was exciting.

love that story, it really captures the pace of the time.

^^^awesome

i purchased transient random-noise bursts *used* from b&d records in springdale, pa circa xmas 1993

best-ever single record-store purchase of my life with the possible exception of helium - the dirt of luck + barry black s/t from cheapo in mpls two years later

One more - I had been turned on to Harry Partch in the summer of 1986 by a literal hobo who I met one night at the local college "shantytown" protest (which was a few homemade shacks in the school union meadow), hanging out at a picnic table by candlelight. He gave me a C90 tape of The Bewitched that I copied and gave back. Of course that shit was hard to find in the pre-CD era. When I moved here to Eugene in late 1990, I finally found The World Of Harry Partch in a record/bookstore. I lived close by and was carrying it the few blocks back home with my girlfriend when the LP slipped out of the jacket (the inner's open side was facing out) and fell on the gravel. One side was totally ruined. I was so crushed that I tossed the LP in the trash. It took me like 6-7 years to find another copy.

sad hijinks

First one was Eels - Souljacker in 2001 when I was 14. Eels was my first favourite band. I grew up with classical music, and Eels was when I realized you could be a fan of something even though it wasn't a masterpiece that had stood the test of time, but just because they, y'know, spoke to you. Anyways, two things I remember: I wanted to hear the new single, and Danish Radio had just made an internet radio channel playing 'alternative' music, and they published playlists of all the tracks they would play throughout the day, so at 20:37 I plugged my dads computer into the phone cable in order to get online, and then I sat by the grand piano and heard Souljacker the song, once, on tinny computer speakers. It was okay. Second thing I remember was when I got the album, which was okay, I was completely blown away by the fact that they reused the violins from their song Selective Memory on their new song Fresh Feeling. I had no idea you could do that, I had no idea how to do that, I had no idea what had just happened, but I thought it was genius. I learned a lot about modern music from listening to Eels.

closest i came to this personally was my struggles to acquire the archers of loaf 'vs. the greatest of all time' ep in 1994. i was working at a borders store in alaska; they couldn't successfully order it. i went to independent elephant records; they couldn't either. alias records sucked so hard that i had to call up a store in north carolina and have them mail it to me.

classic tale from what many would have you believe were the good old days.

much appreciated recollections, all!

gonna try to not do a wall of text, so i'll set the scene as succinctly as possible:
my family did not like the fact that i found therapy via pop music from their constant ridicule. and they really didn't like the pop music i preferred.

i was 15 and had no money. i did partially understand the economics of trading in old tapes+cds for cash/store credit at wherehouse music. i knew the new outkast was 'coming soon' so i had walked over there with my best friend in preparation, and parted with some of my (at the time, very small) collection. wherehouse was a bunch of prudes, so they wouldn't sell anything with an advisory label to anyone under 18. i took the lower amount in cash, stuffed that $20 bill in my sock, and procured a bus system map. this was ~15 august 1996; about 2 weeks before the release date.

it was summer break, so i was spending a lot of time at my best friend's house anyway. we had planned to hang out on the 27th, but i had no intention of telling anyone in my family about the day's true goal: procuring the new outkast album. my friend lived more central to the main metro area, and a bus stop at the end of his street went straight downtown to the transfer station. i was dropped off at around 9am, we were on the bus and en route by 920am.

i didn't even know what the title was until we got into the store and saw it on the new release rack. the cd section was at the back of our local circuit city, but they took care of business over there. still one of the best selections in old school music retail imo.

"AT-lee-ans??!!!" was our collective response. $16.39, after tax. we quickly got back to the other side of the expressway, just in time for the returning line to accept our transfers. back to his place, microwaving burtitos, and blaring the album by 2pm.

we were both enamoured. he dubbed it as we played it for the first time. that was also the first time i had gone anywhere and done something that independent without needing to worry about what any sort of oppressive adult figure would get mad about. it truly felt like victory.

oh yeah, bus fare in reno in 1996 was 85¢ so i also had enough for a dr pepper on the way home.

classic tale from what many would have you believe were the good old days

They were. I bet that album got played an awful lot

This makes me think of two total jump scares, in particular.

First one was scanning the CDs in Tower in the early/mid 90s, like most people I'd scour sections that I knew there wasn't likely to be anything new (perhaps from a long dead band) but I'd do it y'know, just in case.

I can remember it really well, I'd been up to the Jazz section of the Tower in Piccadilly, which I loved visiting, as it was so peaceful, it was situated on the first floor at the front of the building with views wrapping around either side and down onto the circus itself, it felt like being on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise or something.

I walked downstairs and then, just before Ieaving, I browsed the Rain Parade section on autopilot, usually one or two CDs at best but was totally shocked to find this odd-looking CD called 'Demolition' with a brace of titles I'd never heard, I was over the moon.

Probably around the same time (1994) I was itching to get my hands on the Bark Psychosis record that I knew was coming out.

My nightly ritual after leaving work was to walk down Long Acre and over Charing Cross Rd to Newport Court and the beginnings of Chinatown and pop in to see what was in the racks at the wonderful Steve's Sounds.

I'd often haunt the place and they knew me fairly well after a year of hanging about, and stone me, if there wasn't a review copy of Hex sitting there in the £5 bin, I nearly crapped myself, couldn't believe my good fortune and the journey back up the Northern Line to my room felt eternally long.

I should also add to that (somewhat tangentially) De-Luxe Cleaning in Brewer St, which was a laundrette with karaoke rooms (which seemed to be geared for the local Japanese population) but they had shelves and shelves of manga *and* a small section of second hand Japanese music CDs.

It was a bit intimidating going in there, and I certainly caused mild confusion when I would appear and part-ex some CDs that I bought on spec and didn't get on with, but it was fantastic to see all this music stacked up that I had no idea even what 95% of it was.

the karaoke rooms in there were ridiculously hot - it was BYOB so they gave you a fridge to keep stuff cool - but we just kept the fridge open to try to cool the room down out of desperation.

i was really hyped for Odelay by Beck - my friends and i had gone in deep after Mellow Gold, acquiring One Foot in the Grave and Stereopathetic Soul Manure. i was visiting family in San Diego that week and we went to the mall the day before release day. i tried to get the poor clerk at the mall cd store to sell me a copy of Odelay a day early but he wouldn't do it

R.E.M. Document, 1987.

I bought the CD at Alwilk Records in the Livingston Mall, in New Jersey. About 20 other rock geeks were standing there waiting for the guy to open the box of CDs and hand them out to all of us.

I think my first real anticipatory "omg I can't wait until this comes out" moment was Alice in Chains. my first obsessive musical love was Aerosmith, but AiC simply got around to putting out their new album first. and Spin Doctors were the first album I bought on a release date, but I didn't realize Turn It Upside Down was coming out until the day it was out, so there was no time to build anticipation. AiC was the first time I was looking at the calendar in anticipation. My appreciation for them came about more angularly.

I was a kid who hadn't really found his own music, but as a young boy, I realized I liked minor key, downtrodden music more than I enjoyed the happy major-key stuff. that and intense, cheesy power ballady stuff. my folks tried to force their tastes on me, and that managed to get me into Paul McCartney and like Chicago, but I didn't listen to the fun, current music that my peers did in school. I remember everybody being asked about their favorite songs in 3rd grade, and everybody was picking stuff by New Kids on the Block, Paula Abdul, etc, and I was the only nerd picking Chicago - "Look Away".

as a teen I decided to explore music on my own one day and found our "miscellaneous pop" radio station, which was mostly stuff like Real McCoy, Crystal Waters, Ace of Base ,etc, but they'd also play rock like lighter Nirvana and Gin Blossoms. My 'best friend' (who was really just a bully who belittled me often) tried to impart his alt rock tastes on me, but much of it didn't land with me at first. but the darker stuff did, but Alice in Chains actually appealed to me because I heard "I Stay Away", and loved the bizarre vocal harmonies in the pre-chorus, being a choir kid. so I got Jar of Flies, but then I realized this wasn't their core sound, so I got Dirt and that was an instant love affair.

this album would have been too depressing for me as an early 90s elementary school kid who could bop to Wilson Phillips, but I'd just spent 3 years being tormented in middle school, which led my depression/anxiety, which had been present but manageable in elementary school, to intense levels. I hadn't used heroin but the alienation and dark mood of Dirt just spoke to me, and it was hooky af with lots of great harmonies. so I brought it everywhere.

around the time the self-titled was about to come out, I remember my excitement building, mostly because I was glad that Layne wasn't, well, dead. I'd heard the rumors and thought maybe we'd never get another album. at the time I'd never even understood the concept of 'release dates', music was just something that came about via abiogenesis, one day it wasn't on the shelf, then it was. It came out 11/7/1995, which was close to my birthday.

I remember "Grind" coming out on the radio and putting it on and hearing that fat, crunchy riff, and though it took me a few listens, I loved it, and would get excited just hearing it blaring out of people's cars or on radios. I asked for it for my birthday (previously, the only cassette I'd asked for a birthday was MC Hammer's 2 Legit 2 Quit, but it was well past its release date when I got it). I remember my mother handing it to me on the 7th, probably the first time I'd ever been given a gift early, and I went onto a local 16-baud BBS with a chat channel and basically liveblogged myself listening to the album in the channel, annoying the fuck out of everybody there.

It was a cool November day (back before global warming made FL 85 degrees even then), and the computer room was in the garage, so it always was cooler in there, and I was thoroughly enjoying the album. a few of the songs felt odd from a songwriting perspective, but when I got to "God Am", I let out my first excited "oh FUCK yeah". people were begging me to stfu about Alice in Chains, which I finally did after the album ended. and I brought it on the school bus every day for months, as well as to my brother's soccer games, being told to turn my headphones down.

my user name on that BBS, btw, was Neanderthal. though I had pivoted for two weeks to Enzo, for reasons unknown.

I bought the CD at Alwilk Records in the Livingston Mall, in New Jersey. About 20 other rock geeks were standing there waiting for the guy to open the box of CDs and hand them out to all of us.

TIL that Alwilk was a (small, regional) chain. I used to buy jazz CDs at the one in Elizabeth.

similar to Jordan, I also had an experience with Load. I got into Metallica after Alice in Chains, mostly because even being allowed to bring it into the house was difficult. However, I did manage to acquire their entire discography in a year's time, sans Garage Days, in one instance lying to my mother about what album I was going to buy so I could buy Master of Puppets with the $10 she gave me. got chewed out for it. (I'd told her I was buying Mad Season - "Above").

Like Jordan, I remember hearing the Donnington "Devil's Dance" mp3s and thinking they sounded doomy af, and being excited for what was supposed to originally be a double album. and I remember turning on the radio the night they were debuting "Until it Sleeps". and my heart sinking when the song began. I was like "this sounds like an alt rock song!". I hated the production. my excitement was gone. but a few more listens and I grew to like it, so I said "maybe this is the 'radio' song".

our local radio began debuting other songs from the album. the next one was "Poor Twisted Me". rest assured, I was on the internet within minutes telling everyone it was the worst Metallica song I'd ever heard. Then "Mama Said". by now I was in despair. but "Ain't My Bitch" was next and I felt....a little bit better. I eventually grew to like Load, but it was not at all what I was expecting, but I did defend tf out of it that year.

I went onto a local 16-baud BBS with a chat channel and basically liveblogged myself listening to the album in the channel, annoying the fuck out of everybody there.

<3 <3 <3

One day in 1991, the owner of my favorite record store called my brother out of the blue and was like, “Hey, there’s a new My Bloody Valentine album” (shout out to Rusty at Harmony Park in Willowick, Ohio). I remember my brother called me in Pittsburgh, where I was living at the time, and I immediately went to the record store - as in, I hung up the phone, put on my shoes, and jogged straight to the store. We were huge fans of Isn’t Anything and the EPs, but somehow we had no idea there was a new full length on the way. That record changed my life, and it’s a lovely memory.

I bought the CD at Alwilk Records in the Livingston Mall, in New Jersey.

This is great: I find myself around the Livingston Mall pretty often these days, and can now imagine it full of teens waiting for Document. (An album I have strong memories of borrowing from my local library, on vinyl, when I was first getting into music — but that was after Green, I think.)

Document was one of my Columbia (or BMG, I forget) CD club picks. The only REM album I've ever owned or heard in full.

however getting concert tickets, in the 80s, as a teenager who couldn't drive was a much more fraught experience, involving permissions and parental drives to suburban malls and shit

My big experience doing that was the Purple Rain tour. My friend Bill and I had talked a friend of my dad's into driving us to the show — it was about 90 miles away, in Syracuse — if we bought his ticket. And my sister and her friend wanted to go too. So Bill and I, we were 15 I guess, got my mom to drop us off at the mall so we could wait in line outside the record store until it opened, when tickets would go on sale.

The record store and the mall were prepared for this, and they let all of us inside the mall even though it wasn't open yet. We probably got there about 7:30 a.m. for a 9:30 opening or something. We were there a few hours. We were by no means at the head of the line, there were 40-50 people ahead of us. It was all pretty cool, everybody was in a good mood, lots of people wearing Prince stuff, girls with lace gloves and all. I'd never been in a closed mall before, that by itself was a novelty.

I only bought physical concert tickets that way a few times - once at a record store in Rahway, NJ that had a ticket machine that few people seemed to know about, so there wasn't even a line when I went, and then once in L.A. for a run of Christmastime Jane's Addiction shows in 1990. That time my cousin and I had to line up early. I also remember buying tickets over the phone and getting them in the mail.

This is great: I find myself around the Livingston Mall pretty often these days,

It's sad to see the mall completely empty. The cheap cassette bin at the back of Alwilk was so helpful for teenage me in the late 80s. I worked at the toy store, too.

This is a cool thread!

My most vivid memory of this sort of thing is a period where such geekery was seriously *constrained*. Namely when I was in Queensland on a childhood trip to visit relatives while Trompe le Monde and Apocalypse '91 were being released (a week apart, the internet says). It's particularly memorable because I didn't know Brisbane (let alone the regions) or its record emporia, and checking out records was an extremely low priority for the family. I was also relying wholly on JJJ for news about such matters (and Screamadelica, which they were seemingly way more excited about!) rather than familiar hometown radio and press.

I finally found the Pixies record at Rockinghorse Records (somehow renowned pre-internet to even a little out-of-town kid?!?!) moments before going rural, but Public Enemy had to wait weeks. I believe I eventually found it in a regional Target store! As these were CDs, and players were not yet ubiquitous, I had to lug them around for a while before actually listening. The liner notes were likely perused at considerable length. Anyway, I was lukewarm on both records initially, but warmed to the PE soon enough. It took me much longer to come to terms with what juvenile me deemed to be huge flaws with the Pixies record lol.

I remember being pretty disappointed by Apocalypse 91. I had been a fan all along - I bought Yo! Bum Rush The Show a few weeks before It Takes A Nation... came out, saw them live in '88 with EPMD, Stetsasonic and Big Daddy Kane opening, loved Fear Of A Black Planet, saw them again on the co-headlining tour with Anthrax, and then the next album arrived, and it just... wasn't as good. Except for "Shut 'Em Down," which still sounds monumental to me.

Loving this thread. I have a few mundane examples I’ll share when I’m feeling loquacious.

PBKR your Dylan story is absolutely all-time. Wow.

I recognise this syndrome. It's very teenage crush-coded, so probably not surprising that it takes hold of you most seriously in your teens and early 20s. Ironically though, particularly in your teens, your tastes are changing so much that the time between albums is an eternity, in which you may well have moved on. For instance Michael Jackson was my first bona-fide crush and I fell hard for Thriller, but by the time Bad came out so much meaningful time had passed in my life that it barely registered!

Probably the closest I ever came to what's described in your excellent question nabisco is when The Black Album came out. My friends and I drove to the mall to buy it at midnight, on cassette tape so that we could drive around and listen to it. We already knew Enter Sandman obviously and it sounded great in the car but we were impatient for everything else. And, um, oh no. Where was the blistering riffage?? Where were the knotty, complex, multi-part songs with 4-minute instrumental breaks??? Where were the delicious, malicious headbangers?? All the songs were so SLOW. Our drummer Kevin circled back to the parking lot and we each got back into our cars, bereft, confused, turning on the radio, probably, hearing another spin of Jesus Is Just Alright and wondering what happened to our heroes.

I do have good memories of a few other album release days. For instance I went to Tower Records to get Stankonia with my friend Jamila and she put it on her CD discman and I got one earbud and she got the other, and we just walked down Lafayette St listening.

I also remember getting Wowee Zowee on vinyl the day it came out and getting home and playing it over and over.

in your teens, your tastes are changing so much that the time between albums is an eternity, in which you may well have moved on

Yup, exactly what I wanted to get at with that Blur example — it's such a fascinating feeling when you fail to notice this until you're suddenly cringing at one of your favorite bands and wondering what the hell happened. And then often it's partly because they've been moving in the exact opposite direction, which can trick you into thinking it's mostly them, not you, who changed.

*cough* Stereolab circa 1997

(except I was in my early 30s, a better example from my teens is the Dead Kennedys)

only now remembering that I had zero interest in Frankenchrist due to the song lengths (lol teenage hardcore kid), so I was psyched for Bedtime For Democracy. But when I got it (probably close to day of release) I realized it was their worst record yet, no zip or snap or zing at all.

debating whether to invite my brother here so he can write about his experience awaiting Hootie and the Blowfish's Fairweather Johnson.

yes plz

My three: in my teens I lived in rural Tasmania where new albums were slow to arrive, but I'd seen the video for INXS' "What You Need" and played my cassette dub from the TV to death. Listen Like Thieves was due to come out and my mother had to visit a friend in the nearest city, about an hour and a half away, so I scraped together the cash and left it in an envelope with a plea to pick it up for me. When I got home from school the LP was sitting on the kitchen counter and I nearly levitated, rest of the day was spent glued to our shitty turntable absorbing it all. Second, when My Bloody Valentine let slip they were releasing a new one in 2013, after 22 years of silence, I lost my mind again and stayed up most of the night, unable to sleep. The next morning (Aus time) the release and instant website crash took hours to deliver the album, and then I had to burn a CD so I could listen on proper speakers. I cranked it to annihilating volume levels and my six-year-old daughter came in to sit with me while we soaked it all in. And then thirdly, after a year of devotion to IGOR, my other daughter and I were breathlessly anticipating Tyler, The Creator's Call Me If You Get Lost; I was at work when it dropped online and will always remember live-chatting with her as we played it simultaneously. I feel very lucky to have retained the ability to lose my shit at new music.

The first record I remember anticipating was also Zooropa. "Numb" was a curveball but my friend and I started digging it after catching its intriguing video on MTV a few times. We quickly glommed on to "Stay" in addition to "Numb" but found everything else too weird. We used to laugh at how bad Bono's falsetto at the beginning of "Lemon" was and we made a game out of being fast enough to dart to my friend's boombox to skip it before Bono started singing. I guess I thought it was a disappointment compared to Achtung Baby but gave the whole thing a chance eventually - "Lemon" is handily the best song on the album

great great stories on this thread... especially matttkkkk's "I feel very lucky to have retained the ability to lose my shit at new music."

I’m mortified that I refer to “Lafayette St” upthread instead of Lafayette Ave smh

The first Chemical Brothers album released since I became (with some speed) a huge fan was We Are the Night. By that point I had all the albums and was slowly acquiring all the singles. WTTN was given to me as my parents as a gift to listen to on our Corfu holiday the week it was released. My dad encouraged me to have it playing on the journey to the airport but my parents then chatted over great sections of it, when all I wanted to listen to was "The Sunshine Underground" reimagined as proggy electro-house Neu (the title track), or Art of Trance's "Madagascar" reimagined as Erol Alkan ("Saturate"). No matter, I got to know the CD really well throughout the ensuing week - and for the longest time after that (arguably continuing to this day), the music was inseparable from those first week memories.

Oh and I loved it. Still do. Don't think it's any sort of slump for them - even though I appreciate they were continuing to run their 'eclectic' album template into a dead end (we had the out-of-place oligarch-dissing rap track on the last album, now for one about fish), making the (incredible) Further something of a necessity. Title track, "Saturate" and "A Modern Midnight Conversation" (that final gong towards the end is the most speaker-shaking sound I think I'd ever owned) were the favourites. Now I have an equal love for "Das Spiegel" which has that particular childlike wide-eyed feel to it they do so well a la "Pioneer Skies" or the middle of "Asleep from Day", kind of like the closest sound to stomach butterflies without coming over particularly twee.

Anther big moment was Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown which unfolded more ordinarily. Had owned all the albums (and Japanese mini-albums) for a few years by then (was a big gap). My town had an independent CD shop that dutifully sold me my copy on the morning of 15 May 2009. I saw them twice on that tour and felt daft being the only one singing along to the album tracks both times (there's a musical pause in "Murder City" where Billie didn't sing the next line, presumably expecting the audience to have his back. Well I did anyway). Again I still really enjoy the majority of the album, although there are some misfires - not least the nothingy lead-off single "Know Your Enemy" which I wasn't exactly in love with even then. My fandom slipped pretty hard in the 2010s (though I did see them one more time).

This feels really recent to me but Blur's The Magic Whip, insofar as I had been on the Blur forums for four years by then (and again had acquired all the radio interview discs etc I could find - there's really only a few bands whose dusty collectors corners I've ever felt that interested in). So it was the most I'd ever felt wrapped up in an album launch, being surrounded by many others who were just as excited and we were indulging each other in all the conversations we wanted to have about it. I was the first person to buy it in Bath HMV, for which I should have been given a Be Here Now-style certificate. Yet again I liked/still like it.

'Surrender' was a huge one for me as I was in the rare for me situation of having heard a few of the tracks from it in their live set at Homelands festival a few weeks before album came out and I was psyched after that great show.

Then saw there was a live listening party for the album online and I just sat in my University student paper's office on my own one evening because it had a decent Mac and ISDN line, listening in. Obv the sound was garbage but I was just too excited to not want to hear it asap.

Then the album came out just before Glastonbury and I listened to it on the train en route to the festival (my first) in glorious weather. It was playing constantly from stages and stalls all over the site.

And this was all running off equivalent excitement for 'Beaucoup Fish' and 'Remedy' just before it but fsr of those three I loved 'Surrender' just a little bit more at the time because of those experiences.

Bjork’s Homogenic and Stereolab Dots and Loops came out the same day in 1997, I believe. I bought the Bjork at a midnight release day event at a local record store but had to wait on the Stereolab. I was equally into both at the time (maybe Bjork even more) but the only one I have time for now nearly 30 years later is Stereolab,

I actually don't miss feeling this kind of anticipation much anymore, I didn't like the pressure and it felt like it was getting in the way of having a good time or being receptive to the new stuff.

I had got into Smiths/Morrisey around 2002 and I was hyped for You Are The Quarry but I was pretty mortified when I heard the lead single and kind of shocked everyone else seemed to be digging it. It's an okay-ish album but I only properly like one song from it and I wonder how everyone who was praising it back then feels about it now. I think Bloc Party were right that it was nostalgia people were high on.

This isn't about a new release but there was a time when I unexpectedly saw the Bongwater boxed set in a music shop and I was smiling so hard that I felt quite self-conscious, aware that I maybe looked foolish because my excitement was so obvious and I was wondering why such a positive thing should feel so embarrassing.

Probably the earliest such memories for me were acquiring Christian rock albums in around 5th or 6th grade since that's all my parents would let me buy. There was a bookstore attached to our church that had a record section - mostly boring contemporary praise stuff, but occasionally something good would come in. I had no source of information about what bands might have records coming out, but occasionally something would just one day appear, so I religiously (sorry) checked the racks almost every Sunday (also there wasn't much else to do while waiting for our parents to take us home). Some records that I remember acquiring in this way were Petra's _Beat the System_ and _Boys and Girls Renounce the World_ by Undercover. Neither was exactly a disappointment, but also neither was quite as good as the records that came before that had got me into those bands. Another example would be when I really got into Oingo Boingo a couple of years later. (My parents had loosened up a bit by then.) The first of their albums I acquired was _Boi-ngo_ (which was their newest album at the time). It was a bit uneven, but there were a couple of songs I really liked. Then I went back and started buying their back catalog. The great thing was that all those older albums were better than the one that had introduced me to the band. During this period of time, Boingo didn't release any new material. Danny Elfman's soundtrack career was beginning to take off, and I guess he was less interested in writing material for the band (though I didn't really know anything about that at the time). So a couple of years had gone by in which Boingo had become my favorite band, and I had even seen them in concert (a mind-blowing experience), and the whole time they hadn't released any new material. I used to dream about going to a record store and seeing a new album by them in the rack. (By then I was buying cassettes rather than LPs.) Then finally, in 1990 (what seemed like eons later at the time) _Dark at the End of the Tunnel_ came out. It was ok, but not a patch on their classic work, and by then my tastes had moved on quite a bit anyway.

Pearl Jam's Ten was the first album i was super super obsessed with. the town i lived in only had a couple CD stores, and the closest one was a terrible store in the mall. i remember the day Vs came out (and remember, this album had a huge, record-breaking first week, almost a million units sold), I called the store and asked if they had the new Pearl Jam album. they said "yeah," so i went, and they did not have Vs, they just still had lots of copies of Ten. i think i got finally Vs a week or two later when we were upstate at a department store with a decent music section.

fantastic PBKR story

wait, what does 'upstate' mean to some dude

i was living in sussex county, delaware, the department store was in kent county

are you claiming that delaware has an 'upstate'? i have to love it

Me and a friend did one of those midnight release things for Rage Against the Machine’s “Evil Empire”. So 1996 and we snuck out and drove to Criminal Records in little five points in Atlanta. Can’t say I was a huge RATM fan but up for the challenge

oooh I love Criminal REcords. I try to visit every time I'm there

One time j mascis was signing autographs there and we drove from Athens to meet him. I asked him how he got his guitar sound on the mike watt version of maggot brain. He very tersely said a Wah Wah and a big muff. I own both to this day

I didn't own many albums as an adolescent (compulsive radio listener and notorious borrower of friends' records) so my small collection was precious, even the inevitable disappointments and outright duds. The only time I remember buying an album right upon release was Led Zeppelin IV aka ZOSO. I have a clear memory of listening to it for the first time, in my bedroom, on a bleak day toward the end of 1971, weeks before my 14th birthday, and hearing "Stairway To Heaven" before it became a cliche, hadn't even been played on the radio yet or at least I hadn't heard it. I was, as the saying went, blown away. It was a feeling of discovery, landing on a new continent, a widening of my senses and perceptions, that ironically I wouldn't experience again until I stumbled upon Patti Smith and punk rock in fall 1976.

I asked him how he got his guitar sound on the mike watt version of maggot brain. He very tersely said a Wah Wah and a big muff. I own both to this day

lol. throw the kid a bone. good on you j.

Many memories related to music buying. I don't know where to start. Convincing my mom to take me to a department store to buy Synchronicity, and then in the checkout line noticing there's nudity on the cover and trying to cover it with my hand. Waiting in line to buy Use Your Illusion I and II (one on CD, one cassette to save money). Riding my bike to a record store buy rap tapes. One time I got hit by a car on the way back from buying a Slick Rick tape. The couple that hit me drove me home, blaring live Springsteen - I always assumed it was the 75-85 box set that I saw local news stories about people lining up to buy.

So many stories about trying to find an album on release day and coming home unsuccessful. I remember calling stores to try and find Lou Reed's Magic and Loss on release day, finally finding a store in a strip mall that I'd never been to before, going in and they have stacks of it on the counter, and posters, and they're playing it in the store. It was like they'd bought the whole supply. I also remember coming home and playing it and my dad was confused by it, 'this is the album you were calling around town for, really?'

There's one indie store, no longer here but beloved by many, which I hated because I always felt like they were holding new release records for their friends. I'd go and ask about say, the new Superchunk album or similar, and they'd tell me they didn't have it and didn't know if they'd get it. And then I'd talk to another friend who'd tell me they bought it there!

The only group where I've bought every one of their albums on release day, from a store, is A Tribe Called Quest. When I went to college, in a small town, I was worried I wouldn't be able to get their next one on Day 1 but there was a place, a weird dusty cluttered 'bookstore' with lots of cats and smoke that got a small collection of new tapes and CDs each week. I started going there every Tuesday to see what they got in.

To an extent I still have this new release devotion, though it's more often ordering in the mail or downloading. This coming Friday has several albums I'm excited to get the day they're out - Rosalia, SML, Hatchie. I'm 52 and I feel like most weeks since I was a teenager, I've been obsessed about something new coming out...

oh boy that getting run over -> springsteen story is gold

Redding was pretty barren as far as record stores iirc and the few existing stores didn't have And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out

Ha, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out was the first thing that came to mind for me, and my experience was slightly similar to yours WmC, albeit less snot-filled. Senior year of high school, and I skipped school to go out in search of the album. Went to the nearest mall CD store I though would have it, but no luck. An employee checked the store computer and verified that it had indeed been released that day but they didn't have it in stock. He was completely flummoxed by the idea that there could be a new album out that they didn't have in the store. He asked a coworker if he'd seen an album called "Turn Yourself Inside-Out" come in. I ended up having to drive another 45 minutes away to get it at Best Buy. It was worth it, obviously, and nice to have a long drive home for listening to it.

My earliest instance of this experience would have been Homebase by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, but I was nine and I don't have the clearest memory of it now. Most likely my mom took me to K-Mart to get the tape. I DO remember seeing that there was a song called "You Saw My Blinker" on it, and, not knowing what "blinker" meant (my parents called it a "turn indicator"), I decided not to listen to the tape on the ride home with my mom just in case it was some kind of slang or euphemism for...dick, I guess? Turned out there were other reasons I wouldn't have wanted to listen to that song with my mom, so it was for the best. Played that album on my walkman a lot in the following months.

Unfortunately this never really happened with me, I was heavily invested in a few scenes in my adolescent years but never really with single bands/artists. Metallica and Iron Maiden yes, but never to the point where I had huge expectations for the new album, I always kinda assumed "as good as the previous ones, surely those cannot be topped", and as I only got on board after their peak, that was very much what happened. I imagine it must be an awesome experience to be a superfan of an artist on the rise though, hearing better and better albums as they conquer the world...

What did happen was somewhere in 1989 (maybe early 1990?) I had read these reviews & interviews in my favorite music magazines about this awesome new band Morbid Angel and their mind-melting debut, so I borrowed the Altars of Madness LP in my hometown local library, quickly rode my bike home to experience this surely amazing record - and I absolutely hated it, front to back. Put me off death metal for a good year or so. Then I heard Left Hand Path, Consuming Impulse and Gothic, and got with the programme.

As a nine years old kid, I fell hard for The Human League's Dare. (Thanks to playing it endlessly and really closely listening to those synth sounds, I still can play the album in my mind from start to finish.) Living in Finland, I probably didn't acquire it right away, but pretty soon after the Nordic release. One of my parents bought the cassette. Local music paper, which our family subscribed for me and my little brother, had a London "correspondent" (just a Finnish photographer guy living there) and the synth pop/New Romantic thing was very well represented in his column. Love and Dancing versions of Dare songs were also wonderful, I was really into those synth sounds. Later I got wind of the upcoming Hysteria follow-up and was pestering the local record store about that. Really eagerly waiting for the new masterpiece. Finally they had it in store and, expecting Dare Part Two, you can imagine my utter dejection when playing it. That one didn't get many replays.

"And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" is actually one of the main releases I remember from the opposite direction: I was working in a record store that year, processing new arrivals and having lots of conversations with excited teenagers asking whether certain things had shown up, when we'd start selling them, whether I could maybe please just this once slip them a copy ahead of time, whether I could at least hold or hide one for them, whether I'd listened to it yet and could describe its contents in incredible detail, and so on. I remember getting a ton of this with something from Modest Mouse, who I hadn't realized were quite so popular at that point (like 1999); at one point a bunch of cool teenage girls ran up to me on the street to ask about it, which was definitely baffling for the friend I was walking around with. (I always liked when local teens would recognize me as "guy from record store" and ask me things, because at the very least it meant we'd avoided the cliche of the jerky record-store guy you wouldn't try to talk to.)

I really miss midnight record store openings. I remember driving an hour up to Mankato, MN to go buy Use Your Illusion I & II at midnight, though I also remember we listening to Jane's Addiction the whole way up so things were already shifting us away from all the 80s metal we grew up on.

I also will never forget that Wu-Tang Forever and Album of the Year by Faith No More came out on the same day because there were two distinct groups of fans milling around outside smoking cigs waiting for Cheapo in Minneapolis to open up.

I feel very lucky to have retained the ability to lose my shit at new music.

I'm struggling with this. I want to continue experiencing authentic excitement over new music but also stay in control of (and, actually, slow down) the urge to buy new music. With new releases, I'm usually jaded and indifferent, or else I get excited about a new release by pumping myself with a delusional sense of urgency about "needing" it - then I get it and the dopamine wears off. It feels a long way off from the spirit of this thread.

Actually, the last time I excitedly acquired a brand-new record is from last week. I got Friend by James K, whom I wasn't very been aware of until I saw a feature on her ahead of the album release. I kind of lost my shit at the song "Play", though, which led me down a rabbit hole of "why don't I listen to music like this anymore? Why do I keep buying a stream of dance music singles and not save my attention to albums that make me feel like this?" Anyways, the album came out two months ago, but only as a very expensive LP. I kept searching the internet for CD copies but I couldn't find any, decided to go for the LP, but then it was sold out anywhere that wouldn't mean playing loads to ship one thing. Then the label put out more copies of the CD last week, and I got it online, along with a few other things to make overseas shipping worth it.

Not to be a downer but this story feels a little sad. The excitement was real, but the anxious need to Get The Thing and the context of ordering it online feels so flat. This helped me realize I want to taper down getting new music. "Losing my shit" feels more uncomfortable than fun these days, I think I just want to embody that meme that says "I don't want to be in the loop or out of the loop. I want to be aware of the loop & its contents but free from any loop related responsibilities"

I still have excitement about hearing a new album, but that excitement and anticipation now lasts for about 30 seconds - from the time I hear of the album's existence to the time I am listening to it. Whereas before, that anticipation could last days or even weeks or months.

I really can’t remember doing this for new records, even tho I was a frequent haunter of record stores from the time I was in 5th grade until, well, pretty recently!!

I do remember that I got the Prospect Hummer EP at a show before anyone had really heard it— it hadn’t hit stores or the internet yet. That show turned out to be one of the better shows I ever attended, as AnCo basically played through most of Feels to a crowd of ~60 college students in the basement of dormitory. It was incredible.

I remember in high school I bought Primus' Brown Album on vinyl because it came out a week before the CD. No real story though.

i have no great interesting story about purchasing this album, i just drove myself to best buy in columbia, missouri but --

the one that really pops to mind for me here is lil wayne - tha carter III. sort of a very unique time in music history, we were pre-streaming so there was still a wild west feel to music on the internet, thus rap mixtape culture was perhaps at its cultural apex before streaming moved everything back above board, but we were pre-vinyl revival boom, pre-merch bundle packaging of CDs and cassettes with t shirts, physical music media was probably at its lowest ebb (fat nasty and broke). wayne's own eccentricities as an artist reacted w/ this time in a very combustible way and we ended up at this place where wayne not only debuting at number 1 but clocking 1 million copies in his first week had the feel of maybe not an election as much as a coronation. but i took great pride in purchasing the album that day in the same way i feel some measure of pride voting for a candidate i like at the ballot box. i don't think it's really beloved as an album and despite how big of a deal it was at the time from a commercial perspective it feels like this little moment in history when wayne was the biggest artist in the world has somewhat slipped thru the cracks of our collective memory. but that was a fun day to be a music fan

I think of Carter III as the official end of the rap album era.

really great posts itt, thanks all

So I've actually felt my investment in acts I love increasing lately — but I assume that's because I'm less and less in touch with new music, so I end up clinging to the things I've found that I do really connect with. It's not an emotional lose-my-shit attachment, but there's once again a list of acts where I see word of a new record, can't wait to hear it, eagerly rush to obtain, listen to with high hopes and huge excitement. (Give it another 20 years and maybe I'll have like four bands left that I am absurdly dependent on, and if any of them whiff an album it spoils my listening for a whole 9 months.)

The way content is rolled out now + my general disillusionment with everything means there's probably not one artist left on earth where I would "eagerly await" their next release. I'll get excited about music festivals though

i definitely eagerly await a handful of new releases per year -- i think the consumption of physical products related to music is in such a fucked up distorted place right now that it's hard for me to eagerly anticipate the purchase/reception of something physical right now. the only thing i can think of is cindy lee vinyl but that doesn't quite fit the thread given that the album was already out

for example my boyfriend was really excited about the new cure album from last year. we collect cassettes and so he ordered a cassette of the album from the cure's official store. we got the cassette and it was total bunk, just unplayable. he reached out to the cure store and they apologized and sent us a second new cassette -- this one also was a total piece of trash. sometimes you get new vinyl and it's lavishly done and the record sounds good, a lot of times you basically find yourself holding a flimsy piece of cardboard w/ a disc and an insert in it that sounds worse than what you can play off apple music. i think we're in a physical music media bubble right now and the response from major labels/distributors has been to meet that demand by pumping out tons of poorly made products, if anything it's actively working against my ability to eagerly anticipate the arrival of a physical record

I do remember another one, an annoying one. the first death metal show I ever went to was Immolation, in 1999. This wasn't, like, a 'omg dream show' situation, it was...I'm a teenager, I've been listening to this genre for 15 minutes, and this band I literally just discovered 5 minutes ago is coming 5 miles from my dorm. the show kind of reset my expectations of live music and the scene as a whole, because prior to getting into metal, every concert I'd been to had been some kind of big arena event, or at the very least, something that THOUSANDS of people attended. I think my first concerts were:

Chicago - 1989 (then 9 years old)
Candlebox - 1995
Foo Fighters - 1995
Metallica - 1997
Aerosmith - 1997
Slayer - 1999

so like...I think the smallest attendance of all of those shows was probably like 1,000 - 2,000 (Candlebox). even Slayer, who were in lean years at the time, managed to almost sell out a 5k House of Blues. So I get ready for hundreds of screaming fans to join me in screaming CAN YOU HEAR US, DEATH TO JESUS at the Immolation show and promptly find about 15 people there.

at first I'm like...the fuck is this? I could just go to someone's house and experience this, the stage is 2 inches off of the ground, half the bands are in the crowd watching the show, like at the time I expected everything to be spectacle, lighting arrays, big roaring crowds, this huge barrier between artist and audience, and like...what, a gathering of less people than a Thanksgiving dinner is a 'show' that I have to pay for?

then the show happened, and I was blown away at the ferocity of the performance but also just how crazy *into it* everybody along with me was. Like this wasn't like a huge rock concert where you're spending half the show telling the loud couple in front of you to shut the fuck up with their banal conversation so you can hear the damn show, everybody was just transfixed and into it. and then afterwards, seeing the band and going up and talking to the guitarist, Bob Vigna, like he was just any other dude. the shit two hours ago that I was viewing as a detriment to my enjoyment of the show was now quickly appearing to be a feature. like punk, hey look, here's this scene where, to paraphrase the musical Title of Show, 10 people are celebrating their favorite thing instead of 1000 people enjoying their 9th favorite thing.

long-winded intro aside, so I went from being a casual fan of Immolation to a full-throated fanboy by the time their next album came out, Close to a World Below, which was perhaps the most evil fucking album I'd ever heard. at the time, I'm a writer for Satan Stole My Teddybear, and I mostly focus on metal, and the siterunner, at the time, wasn't big into death metal (though he likes it a lot more now), so he would frequently sent me promos. Immolation were about to put out the follow-up to Close to a World Below, Unholy Cult, and as I was anxiously counting down the weeks to its release, siterunner says the label contacted him and he had them send it to me, so not only would my broke ass get it for free, but earlier than everyone else.

at the time, I'm still going to college, so I'm still living with the folks, who had gone out of town on vacation. I get confirmation that the promo is delivered and get ready to go to the community mailbox. One problem...the mail key is nowhere to be found (I never had my own! We all used one mail key). I called Dad - "sorry son. we accidentally brought it with us".

I briefly tried shiving the mail slot before realizing it might not be worth getting arrested because I can't wait a damn week to hear the album. so they finally get home and basically the wait almost ruined it, I didn't get to hear it 'weeks early' (which woulda made me feel like a cool insider), I got to hear it like a day early, so it disappointed the fuck out of me the first time. Since then, it's become one of my favorites.

Siterunner and I then had a falling out and he deleted all of my reviews and briefly banned me from the board, so the promos stopped, so I continued getting all of their releases on release date, not missing a release date since. (He and I are cool now, all of the ex-members of that site have reconnected on Discord and are friendly again). He doesn't remember deleting my reviews and feels bad about it now lol.

xxpost the one year I briefly got back into vinyl I was shocked at the amount of brand new sealed vinyl albums that were sent to me scratched or unplayable. it wasn't most of them but it was kinda like 'yo, I didn't buy this to mount on the wall'. (wasn't my turntable either! Mine had no trouble with vintage-era records)

all complaints about current physical media otm

however, this has not stopped me from continuing to hotly anticipate new releases from a slew of current bands, thank god for Bandcamp (knocks on wood). I generally have new releases in my wishlist once they get announced, and the lag time can be up to 3 months. I almost never buy new physical media after my 2024 tape binge.

I still love listening to new releases, and every week I look forward to hearing what friday will bring. Every friday, I take my son to kindergarten, and then I know exactly what new record I want to hear. I'll put that on in Apple Music, and listen to the first fifteen minutes of it as I bike through Copenhagen to work. Some weeks, it's so so. Some weeks it's really really great. It's a nice little ritual.

I used to do that ritual on Sundays, back when I was a church singer. I would put the new releases I wanted to hear on a playlist, and put it on shuffle as I took the train out to the church in the suburbs where I was singing. The week I remember is (checks release dates) March 29th 2024. The two records I was interested in that week was Cowboy Carter, and the new album by Danish grindcore act Septage. Put that on shuffle, and what you get is Cowboy Carter, but there's a 20 second interlude of noise and screams between all the tracks. Honestly, it kinda worked, she could pull that off for her rock album.

This is a sidebar on this topic, but working in a record store on release day was always fun. Ripping open boxes full of new releases. The smell of new records. The variations in texture of record sleeves. Seeing them all pristine and waiting to be discovered (or not). People rushing in to buy them as soon as they came out. All of that has stayed with me.

I remember Nevermind coming in on release day. We got two copies of it on each format. I don't think those copies made it out onto the shop floor, we snapped them up instantly and played it to death in the shop. Maybe the tape made it out.

Great thread, really enjoying all of the stories here.

I don't know that I had a specific story that matches these, but one of the record stores I used to haunt in college would have midnight release parties for selected big new albums. The ones I remember most were for Mellon Collie, Pearl Jam's Vitalogy and also No Code.

The No Code one sticks with me most, as it was released on August 27th, just before I started my junior year of college. It was my first time living in non-dorm housing and had moved down a few days early to get settled in the apartment. My roommates weren't due for another day or two, so the first night I was there alone, which suited me well to get acclimated. I had already planned on hitting up the midnight sale for No Code, but it was colored by getting a phone call from my mom that my grandfather passed away. He had been suffering horribly from ALS, so it wasn't a complete shock and in some ways an odd relief to be through his suffering. That call came about 9 o'clock that night and there wasn't much to do since I wouldn't head back for the funeral until the weekend.

I was the first and only, as it turns out, of my grandfather's kids and grandkids to go to his alma mater, so we had been closer as I went to school and he liked to tell me about his time there, before he got too weak to do much of anything. I was sad, to be sure, but also somewhat relieved for him, and I decided to stick with my plan for hitting up the midnight sale. The event itself was uneventful and subdued since classes really hadn't started yet and campus was still filling up.

Anyway, all this to say I have strong memories of listening to No Code on repeat that night, thinking about my grandfather and the new year, first time really living on my own. Probably the most bittersweet memory I have of that phase of my life.

Really loved reading that, it resonated with a few memories of my own.

Okay in terms of media-acquisition I should admit something relevant and job-related: often my experience of new music from artists I like is that I am sitting there deleting my way through hundreds of irrelevant PR emails and suddenly go "wait, did that one say New Album from Favorite Act I Care About?!?!," and then the happy anticipation period is just until the next commute I can spend listening to it. For stuff where I'm just waiting for a release date ... it could be my favorite artists ever releasing a joint concept album based entirely on my life, and I would still forget that date until three weeks later

I think Bandcamp has brought back a tiny bit of the excitement and anticipation for me, since I get a heads up more often when something new is coming out by an artist I love. So I pre-order it and get more of a buildup until I actually get to hear the whole thing.

I remember Nevermind coming in on release day.

I don’t remember the day I bought Nevermind but it was pretty soon after it was released, in the fall of my sophomore year. I hadn’t been anticipating it but I had heard a bit of it on a local LA public access tv show that featured indie music and liked it. I remember mentioning it to an ex-roommate who sometimes asked what I was listening to when I ran into him on campus. There was a period of a month or two until its sales took off and after it became inescapable he ran into me again and said something like, Hey you were right about that being a good album.

I had gone off to some sort of summer camp and when I got back to school everybody was like so what do you think about Nirvana and I was like who? and they were like WHAT???? and immediately drove me around in the car and played it on repeat so that i was brought up to speed. (i didn’t see what all the fuss was about. to my mind it had a long way to go to be as good as the black crowes lol)

I was doing a radio show on a local station that is run by the high school district, when I came in to my show the DJ before me said "so all the high school kids were freaking out about this Nirvana record and playing it all day" - I believe this was just a couple of days after the MTV video for "Teen Spirit" aired.

i'm now questioning my memory because wikipedia sez it was only released to radio stations at the very tail end of august.. is it possible the frenzy could have happened in the space of like two weeks?

we're veering off the thread topic though.. this is one of those releases that maybe 15 people were anticipating but which blew up anyway

is it possible the frenzy could have happened in the space of like two weeks?

absolutely

I bought Nevermind (tape) the same day that Ice Cube's Death Certificate was released (also bought the tape) so I link them together, but research tells me Nevermind had been out a month

Apparently MTV first aired the Teen Spirit video on 120 Minutes on Sept. 29, so 5 days after the album release. In those days, few people watched 120 Minutes. It wasn't in heavy rotation on MTV for a couple more weeks. The album only sold 6,000 copies in its first week of release, and the label had only shipped about 46,000 copies to stores. By December it was selling 300-400K per week.

Actually probably the only person I knew who had been anticipating it, a serious punk fan, didn't like it. He thought it was a fall-off from Bleach. Probably not an unusual reaction for the true heads.

My main memory on that one is hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the college radio station toward the end of August, calling later to request it (so I could tape it), and having an exasperated-sounding DJ tell me they were sick of getting requests for it and were just going to play it every hour on the hour. I don't think I even considered whether there was an album to get, though, and I had no particular way to hear about release dates; I just wanted to grab the song on cassette so I could listen to it again and play it for a metalhead friend who thought everything I liked was too fluffy. I'm not even sure how the average person would have developed release-day anticipation back then. If you weren't tuned in to magazines or checking the signs at record stores (or in a big urban market where you'd see posters, I guess?), you wouldn't often see any forthcoming dates, and it was pretty rare/exclusive (or maybe just costly as a marketing exercise) to have radio make a big deal about a particular new record in advance.

i often think about that, how in the pre-digital era release dates for all but the biggest albums were mostly a mystery to me. even in zines and magazines if you happened to see an ad for something it would often just say "coming soon" or "this summer". in record stores i would just methodically check the rack for every band that i liked, on the off-chance that something new would be in there, and sometimes a new album would just materialize as if by magic. the pitchfork thread recently got me remembering what a revelation it was for me to have the news feed in the early 00s, the first reliable way i'd ever encountered of regularly hearing about release dates and tour announcements.

sure but also keep in mind that Tuesday was "new release day" for decades, so the real heads would just show up every week on Tuesday morning iirc (I never did this).

I knew when albums (both big and small, so to speak) were coming out thanks to the UK weekly music papers which would have news items on upcoming albums and also adverts about them.

I bought Late Registration the day before it came out cause I was working at a record store. That was truly one hella anticipated album, iirc.

honestly I was mad when they moved new releases to Friday because Friday already had plenty to like about it without release day, whereas new releases on Tuesday gave me something to look forward to in the normally dreary beginning of the week.

Release dates were on a Monday in the UK and, as KK says, heavily advertised in the UK music press, so you always knew. I think chains like HMV and Our Price advertised them on TV as well.

I've heard stories about hardcore collectors going into Rough Trade or wherever every week and just buying one of every new 7" release in the golden years of 1978-1982, yes I am jealous

Neanderthal otm, new music Tuesdays always gave me something to look forward to in the start of the week, which was nice. I remember in high school, back when I lived in an area without any real record stores and had to settle for what I could get from Best Buy/Circuit City, for the most part, being excited to flip through the circulars that came with the Sunday paper to see what was coming out that coming Tuesday. Sounds pretty quaint now, but for someone without access to a cool record store and no internet, that was the lifeline to what was coming out.

vaguely remember circuit city inserts advertising new albums. for a few years they had the best selection of new releases in my suburb.

I remember buying Entombed's Clandestine in a Best Buy once. lol...those were...different times. I think it was 1999.

Not to harp on the Nirvana thing too much, but it's kind of funny rewatching this clip of an endearingly unprofessional promotional appearance by Kris and Dave of Nirvana on the local Orange County afternoon music video show, Request Video, from Oct. 24, 1991. I think I already had the album by this time. I used to watch this show whenever I could catch it during that fall. I didn't have MTV in my dorm.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CVbZLEAB245/

Best Buy used to have a SHOCKINGLY good music section. Every new release, obscure underground releases, weird imports, box sets, all at “Here, please take this” prices.

I remember being surprised at finding Street Hassle by Lou Reed on cassette in a Best Buy circa 1999.

Yeah, it was kinda location dependent, but Best Buy really could have amazing music selections back in the '90s. I remember the one I went to in the early 90s had an admittedly tiny, but still, MIAMI BASS section for CDs. That location had, iirc, 6 double-sided aisles of CDs that went from the front of the store to nearly the back.

Even up until around 2006-2008, there was one Best Buy in a suburb not too far from me that still carried amazing metal releases that I'd NEVER see at other chain stores. I don't know how that worked back in those days, but I assumed that particular location had a metalhead music buyer.

Weird to be nostalgic for fuckin' chain stores, hey.

I skipped school with a fairly well played cd copy of Nirvana's Incesticide in my pocket to go and blag Ride's 3rd album Carnival of Light at Probe Records in Liverpool on the day it was released. I loved Ride in 1990. I don't know to this day why I thought I could say the Nirvana record was shit and I should be able to swap it with the Ride cd but that's what happened and I got away with it. The 3rd Ride album was dreadful.

lots of things I used to go pick up on release day, but the album I remember really clamoring for was AMC's San Francisco, to the point where I annoyed the shop going in weekly for a few months to find out if they got it in (for whatever reason, they didn't know the actual release date for that in 1994).

this isn't really the same thing at all . . . but even so i'm not gonna search for a more appropriate thread

at some point in the late '80s i was home on a saturday night. my parents were out to dinner and i was reading 'the eyes of the dragon' by stephen king. and then WDVE Pittsburgh tipped me that they were gonna play foghat's 'slow ride', which i'd been trying to tape for years. so i did, finally. (fantastic/absurd song)

in retrospect this is silly for a number of reasons, but it was absolutely A Moment for me

also i probably ate a can of corned beef hash for dinner <3

that is an A++ memory mookie, we should all be so lucky to have a moment like that in our lives

I'm just gonna mentally enhance that memory by imagining you were reading the chapter narrated by the dog

I have a similar fond memory from the taping-off-the radio days of my youth, the DJ not only played my request for Led Zep's "In The Evening" but dedicated it to me by name!

I was 13

I miss the taping off the radio days very much. I won a signed Nico McBrain Maiden single from the Krusher show on (I think?) Capital FM.

I cycled miles to a record shop in Kingston to buy the tie-in CD for the 1992 Gods of Grind tour (Entombed, Carcass, Confessor, Cathedral). It was a pretty terrifying shop, in all the classic record store ways, and I was a gawky 17-year-old who was desperate to impress and be liked. The dudes in there were pretty severe at the best of times, but it wasn't until I got out and caught myself in a shop reflection that I realised I had a giant bogey on my upper lip. So that was good.

Mercifully, no bogeys when I got my 'No More Mr Nice Guy' picture disc signed by Dave Mustaine in the same shop.

for me it was the Fatboy Slim remix of "Body Movin" by Beastie Boys. I think they played it on Sifl & Olly once, but it was only like a minute of it, not the whole thing. a week later it made #10 on TRL but I had only tuned in time to see the last 20 seconds. so I figured the station most likely to play it and would tape an hour of it whenever I left the house

and it worked! It took a few weeks but eventually the station DID play it. I had all but given up at that point. I listened to it so many times that week to the point where the DJ chatter is still etched into my brain (they were coming out of a weather report) - I remember making my friends listen to it too but nobody could get past the intro where its just like "BODYBODYBODYBODYBODYBODYBODYBBBBBBBBBBB"...two of them asked me, is this a joke? Do you really like this? My response was always, "you really dont??"

even now I find it odd that I actually have the track on CD and vinyl. I spent so much time looking for it.

A couple of years ago my father gave me a bunch of my old cassette tapes that were still somewhere in his house. Back when I was a kid I would sometimes just tape the radio for half an hour/45 minutes if it was supposed to be playing stuff that I wanted to tape so I've been slowly going through all these tapes with a bunch of snippets of 1989-1991 radio. It is crazy how much music from that era is seemingly completely forgotten by everybody.

i was obsessed with the cutting crew's 'died in your arms tonight' when i was 6 or 7 and vividly remember taping it. felt like christmas

6 7

all that nirvana talk reminded me of a time where the 'excitedly acquiring' went a little too far. my parents threw me into rehab for a little over a month when i was 15 in '94. i remember getting out right before christmas because my older brother and sister were home from college. my brother, who was very much like a second dad at this point, took me out xmas shopping. we stopped at this little independent cd store near the mall and they were playing the unplugged nirvana album over the speakers. i guess it came out while i was in rehab because i had never heard it and was completely floored. we must have walked in during the second half of the album because i know i heard "Plateau" and we were there for "Where did you sleep last night." Damn, looking at that stretch of songs now and i can see 15 yr old me's mind exploding. "Oh me," "lake of fire," fuck yes! then the mental calculous started working. number one, and the primary concern, was that i had to have this. that was coldly followed by "you have no money." before i could do anything stupid, my brother snatched me and we went to the mall.

not sure which store it was, but i know it was a previous target. i must've told my brother some excuse and snuck over. shoplifting cds used to be stupidly easy. this is right before they started putting in the magnetic strip to set off an alarm and the stores were basically run by the kind of kids that you would typically see working at a store in the mall. not sure what i did this time, but we used to ask the one employee in the store (!) if they had that cool poster on the wall for sale in the back. i would shove the cd in my pants and actually stick around for the clerk to come back out and say 'no, sorry we're out'.

anyway, this time was no different and i nabbed the unplugged cd. me and my brother leave the mall and are heading home but he says he wants to stop at this one sports store on the way to look for soccer cleats. i say i'll wait in the car. when i'm alone, i pull the cd out and tear of the cellophane. ah beautiful. but just then my brother returns and sees me with the cd. he's like, where tf did you get that?!? he quickly puts it together and i remember begging him on the way home not to mom and dad. they might throw me back in!! he was a hard mfer and of course told my parents who's punishment was to take me back to the mall, give the cd back, and apologize. the cd store clerk told me i was BANNED.

the one thing i remember though, is that while my brother was telling my parents what happened and they were deliberating my fate, i dubbed the cd to a tape. i just bought it on vinyl a few months ago but the moral of the story is that i can be an unrepentant dick when i need my music fix

damn amazing story

obviously the fact that you can instantly stream basically anything ever recorded now is awesome - something I could've only dreamed of as a 12 year old - but I do miss music having that kind of value to it. CDs used to make cool presents and it was always neat to borrow things from someone's collection, like a piece of their world was entering yours. the only person I can think of who even owns a CD player now is my father-in-law from Mexico. barely anyone even has an MP3 collection anymore. everyone just uses streaming. best you can do is recommend something which they'll probably only listen to once. if at all.

and yeah I even miss the anti-theft devices on CDs, especially those long plastic holders that made it so you couldn't just pocket 'em, just the implicit idea that they're something people would want to steal