Placebo - Black Market Music

Placebo spent nine months on Black Market Music, longer than they had ever spent on anything, and it shows in a record that is thicker, stranger and angrier than the two albums before it. Released in October 2000 and produced by Paul Corkett, it reached number six in the UK, and it remains the album where Brian Molko, Stefan Olsdal and Steve Hewitt stopped writing pure glam-damaged rock and started building something with real weight underneath it.

"Taste in Men" opens on a coiled, industrial-leaning groove that sets the terms for everything after. "Slave to the Wage" and "Special K" are the anthems, the latter delivering the most wild-eyed vocal Molko ever committed to tape over a riff that refuses to let go. "Spite & Malice" brings Justin Warfield in and drags the band sideways into hip-hop territory that nobody expected from them, while "Black-Eyed" and "Peeping Tom" hold the quieter, more damaged register. Electronic textures run through all of it, and the political edge Molko sharpened here is blunter and more direct than his usual coded writing.

Twenty-five years on it sits as the pivot point in the catalogue, the record that separates the band's early notoriety from the sustained career that followed. For a certain generation it was also the gateway drug.

This vinyl edition brings the album's dense, layered production to the turntable, where the bass finally has the room it always needed. A cornerstone of the era.