Link 80
17 Reasons
When I was in middle school, you had to have a band shirt, and it had to be punk rock. The first shirt that I was able to buy using my lawn-mowing money was a Link 80 shirt from Asian Man Records, ordered through a mail-order form that came with an Asian Man CD I bought at a record store. I would have worn that shirt every day if I could have; I probably tried. 17 Reasons, the band’s first full-length album, was stuck on repeat on my stereo, on continuous rotation until the CD started to scratch and glitch, no matter how careful I was with it. Unlike my classmates who listened to mainly punk and ska, I had settled on hardcore punk as my preferred subgenre, and Link 80 delivered from all sides: punk and ska with a hardcore flavor and a couple cameos and hardcore breakouts that left no room for posers and defined all the punk rock subgenres for me. Looking back, 17 Reasons was an album that got me through one of the most difficult, trying times in my life. A formative album for my formative years.
Matt Maday 