Singer/bassist John Doe and guitarist Billy Zoom formed X in L.A. in 1977, just as the debut albums by the Ramones and the Clash debuts were inspiring the first wave of southern California punk bands such as the Dickies, the Germs and the Circle Jerks. Soon, Doe’s girlfriend Exene Cervenka joined as X’s second lead singer, along with early Germs drummer D.J. Bonebrake. As their twangy, cinematic sound spread via the Yes L.A. compilation and KROQ’s influential DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, X became the flagship band of the insurgent alternative label Slash Records.
Doe and Cervenka married in 1980, the same year X released Los Angeles, a landmark debut album that influenced a generation of bands to fuse punk with country music. X reigned as college radio fixtures and one of America’s best alternative bands for most of the ‘80s, edging closer and closer to the mainstream over the decade. X started to fray, however, after Doe and Cervenka’s 1985 divorce and the 1986 departure of Zoom.
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Thankfully, the band’s original lineup reunited in 1999 and has toured consistently ever since. In 2020, they released their first album in 27 years, and earlier this month, they unveiled their ninth and final full-length, Smoke & Fiction. Where does it rank alongside trailblazing ‘80s classics such as Wild Gift and More Fun in the New World? Let’s explore.
9. Ain’t Love Grand! (1985)
Ain’t Love Grand! was released the year that Doe and Cervenka divorced. It was the first X album without the Doors’ Ray Manzarek producing, and Zoom’s last with the band for decades. German producer Michael Wagener, who’d primarily worked with hard rock bands such as Dokken and Great White, instead gave the album a slick, cavernous sound that clashed badly with the band’s tight, punky arrangements. It was commercial enough that the brooding rocker “Burning House of Love” crossed over from college radio, peaking at No. 27 on Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks chart, and X even appeared on American Bandstand. X doesn’t quite sound like X on Ain’t Love Grand!, but it occasionally works for them. They even resemble the B-52’s a little on a song called “Love Shack” that’s otherwise unrelated to the same-named hit Fred Schneider and company released four years later.
8. Hey Zeus! (1993)
Surprisingly, X’s profile rose in the five years after the band went on hiatus in 1988. A cover of the Troggs’ ‘60s hit “Wild Thing,” recorded as a one-off single in 1984, became one of X’s most popular and enduring tracks after being featured in the 1989 comedy Major League. Doe also got into the movies with roles in Road House and Great Balls of Fire and released a successful solo album. Thanks to Billboard’s late ‘80s introduction of a Modern Rock singles chart, Hey Zeus! gave X their only two hits on the tally, “Country at War” and “New Life.” X minimized their roots rock influences on the album, with a sharper ‘90s sound thanks to producer Tony Berg (Squeeze, Michael Penn) and engineer Tchad Blake. In addition, Tony Gilkyson’s extended guitar solo on the six-minute closer “Drawn in the Dark” is his finest moment with the band. “John Doe’s singing voice still shines, Exene’s was better before she learned how, and Tony Gilkyson is now Billy Zoom,” Craig Marks wrote in the SPIN review of Hey Zeus!
7. Alphabetland (2020)
Zoom rejoined X in 1999, but at first, the band’s classic lineup primarily toured and performed their old songs. Then, in April 2020, X celebrated the 40th anniversary of Los Angeles with the surprise release of their first new album in decades. With a satisfyingly dry, modern sound from producer Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith), Alphabetland sidesteps the overproduction that marred some earlier albums, and Doe and Cervenka’s voices ring out together beautifully on “Strange Life” and “Star Chambered.” It’s X’s shortest album, zipping by in 27 minutes, but the goofy trifle “Cyrano de Berger’s Back” and Cervenka’s spoken word closer “All the Time in the World” are dangerously close to feeling like filler even on such a brief record.
6. See How We Are (1987)
Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin had played with members of X in the Knitters and the Flesh Eaters, so he was a natural choice to join the band when Zoom left in 1986. Alvin wrote one song during his brief tenure, but See How We Are’s lead single “4th of July” is a classic X song with a soaring chorus. Gilkyson soon joined to help finish the album, and remained in X for a decade. Overall, British producer Alvin Clark (Gene Loves Jezebel, Fine Young Cannibals) didn’t seem to know quite how to capture X’s scrappy energy in the studio, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench chose a disappointingly dinky Casiotone sound for his cameo on “You.” “The material devolves into complaints, throwaways, wasted stanzas, and utter clinkers,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of See How We Are.
5. More Fun in the New World (1983)
More Fun in the New World is, true to its title, probably the most upbeat X album, and they sound like a badass bar band on “Make the Music Go Bang” and a cover of “Breathless,” a song popularized by Jerry Lee Lewis. X’s fourth album is a particular favorite of Eddie Vedder, who’s covered four different songs from More Fun on various occasions with Pearl Jam, the Supersuckers, and members of X. “True Love” and “Hot House” feel a little generic and underwritten, but “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” is a classic X song that surveys the political and musical climate of the ‘80s, namechecking contemporaries such as Black Flag, the Minutemen and D.O.A.
4. Smoke & Fiction (2024)
When a long-running band goes into making an album knowing that it’ll be their last, the gravity of the moment can inspire them to give it their all. X stuck with Alphabetland producer Schnapf and label Fat Possum for the follow-up, but Smoke & Fiction is more consistent and more purposeful, with Zoom playing an inspired fuzz guitar solo on the standout “Face in the Moon.” The scorching “Sweet Til The Bitter End” is a fitting epitaph for a band who have capped their career with their best album in decades.
3. Wild Gift (1981)
Like many sophomore albums, Wild Gift dips into the backlog of songs the band wrote before their debut, including early live staple “I’m Coming Over” and re-recordings of “Adult Books” and “We’re Desperate” from X’s first single in 1978. They’re hardly leftovers, though – in fact, they’re essential X, alongside freshly written anthems such as “The Once Over Twice” and “Universal Corner.” Wild Gift is probably X’s most straightforward punk album, without the wider scope of instrumentation and influences that decorate most of their other releases. “Billy Zoom becomes the music’s vital center, coolly unleashing succinct, revelatory guitar lines reclaimed from Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, and every junk guitarist worthy of the name,” Debra Rae Cohen wrote in the Rolling Stone review of Wild Gift.
2. Under the Big Black Sun (1982)
X’s third album features some of their heaviest grooves as well as some of their prettiest melodies. The arresting opener “The Hungry Wolf” crashes in with Bonebrake’s pummeling tom-toms, while the doo-wop ballad “Come Back to Me” features one of Cervenka’s finest solo vocal performances on the verses and the first of many appearances by Zoom moonlighting on saxophone. “Blue Spark” is probably the last song from the band’s early live repertoire to make it onto an album, and features one of Zoom’s most dynamic and creative riffs. Under the Big Black Sun peaked at No. 76 on the Billboard 200, their career best, and Cervenka has called it her favorite X album.
1. Los Angeles (1980)
X were actually covering “Soul Kitchen” by the Doors well before they met one of the song’s co-writers and began a lengthy collaborative relationship with Manzarek. The Doors keyboardist saw X play the song “At a thousand miles an hour” at the Whiskey a Go Go in the late ‘70s, which led to him producing Los Angeles and playing organ and synth on four songs on the album. When Bob Biggs founded Slash Records to document the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene, the label’s first two full-length albums helped illustrate the two divergent paths into which the scene would split. The Germs’ sole album, 1979’s blistering (GI), pointed the way toward hardcore, and a few months later, X presented a side of punk that was more welcoming of ‘60s influences, from the Doors cover to the revved-up rockabilly riffs of “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, but You’re Not.” The intoxicating cocktail of romance and menace in Doe and Cervenka’s voices, however, was something altogether new, and “Los Angeles” and “The Unheard Music” remain some of the greatest American punk songs ever written.
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