Heavy Song of the Week is a feature from Heavy Consequence that looks at the best metal and hard rock songs you should listen to every Friday. This week, the top spot goes to X for his nostalgic new single “Big Black X.”
Los Angeles punk legends X will release their latest album in August, marking their historic career.
The group’s 1980s output captured a time and place—a rough-and-tumble Hollywood and its burgeoning punk scene—with literary intensity. These LPs can sit alongside John Fante novels on the bookshelf, just as they can assume the sole “X” entry in your alphabetical record collection. Yet for all the poetic emphasis in Exene Cervenka and John Doe’s lyrics, the defining trait of their art, the songs always had something to hold on to musically, too: a surfy Billy Zoom riff, a memorable vocal hook, a catchy chorus, and so on.
“Big Black X”, the lead single from X's upcoming album Smoke and fiction, is a nostalgic review of everything I just mentioned in that last paragraph. In the lyrics, Exene recalls the group's formative days, and the song's title references the seminal LP. Under the big black sun as well as the giant 'X' that the band took from the signage of a decommissioned skyscraper to burn on the cover of their debut album, the Angels.
As their 2020 comeback album, AlphabetlandIt more than demonstrated that the band has not lost its talent either. Here we find the captivating harmonies of Cervenka and Doe, the rockabilly/surf magic of Billy Zoom and the always steady drums of DJ Bonebrake. It's immediately identifiable as an X song and a fitting self-reflection on the years that forged one of punk rock's most enduring groups.
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