In 1978, before Samhain and lawsuits, before splits and arguments over who can be considered ‘original’, and long before the skull face logo appeared everywhere from trading cards to tiki mugs, Glenn Danzig, Jerry Only and their friends were just a bunch of twenty somethings. They were some guys messing about in a band and doing okay at it. They’d only started playing under the name Misfits about a year before, in fact. A show at the legendary CBGBs had put them on the map, but they were a long way away from being the band who could sell out stadiums.

After a trademark disagreement resulted in the band being given a little bit of studio time as a settlement, Danzig, Only, guitarist Franché Coma and drummer Mr Jim pulled seventeen tracks together. There was barely any leeway for re-takes or overdubs; they went in, thrashed out their songs mostly live, and ended up with their debut record. However, no label wanted it. A straight punk band singing fast songs in 1978? That’s been done. Misfits put out four of the tracks as their single ‘Bullet’ on their own label, then quietly shelved the rest of the album. Their guitarist and drummer quit, and the remaining Misfits started rethinking their direction. 

By 1982, Misfits were ready to restart and hit the ground running with their ‘proper’ debut, ‘Walk Among Us’. Everything that we love about them was in place; the haircuts, the horror, the power. Their real debut was reused in pieces here and there, but it wasn’t until 1996 that ‘Static Age’ was officially released as part of their gorgeously coffin-shaped box set. The lost time capsule of the primordial Misfits was finally able to be heard as it was intended to be. 

The lack of glossy production only amplifies what a force they must have been during their early shows. There’s also a uniquely Misfits identity from the second ‘Static Age’ opens. Listen closer to the lyrics and we’re confronted with the genesis of the horror sound before they even called themselves horror punks. ‘Return Of The Fly’ lists out the credits to the eponymous 1959 movie in furious style, ‘Bullet’ delves into the Kennedy assassination in crude detail and ‘She’ takes the image of Patty Hearst robbing a bank and bounces it into lurid fantasy. They’re already letting their love of the gory and grim out in fantastic style long before they commodified it, and it feels so much more seedy and authentic. 

We forget that Misfits were recording their debut only a couple of months before the Ramones dropped ‘Road to Ruin’, which spawned ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’. Their influence looms huge on ‘Static Age’ resulting in a gloriously scuzzy mashup of the two iconic bands’ sounds. But there’s also a lot of Iggy and the Stooges in the mix, and that garage miasma leads you to feel like you’re practically breathing the polluted New York air with every listen. We get the sense that Misfits could easily have taken the road more travelled at this point and focused on nasty, trashy but ultimately conventional punk rock, becoming staples of their scene. They would undoubtedly have been great at it too. Instead, they picked out the aspects they loved from ‘Static Age’, learned from it, and invented their own genre from this sonic brick that they threw, hoping to hit a window. 

Arguably the most exciting part of this whole sage is that thirty years after ‘Static Age’ was finally released, and forty-eight years after it was recorded, we’re still feeling the ripples from the stone that Misfits dropped into the punk pond. We wouldn’t have horror-punk without Misfits, and we wouldn’t have Misfits without ‘Static Age’. Spencer Charnas and Davey Havok would have stuck to safe paths without Danzig as a role model, and he wouldn’t be the frontman we know and fear without this album to kick start it all. There’s no way the world would so readily embrace the skull-masked Papa lineage from the world of Ghost if we hadn’t already grown to love Misfits, and we can only speculate what the unnamed Misfits cover recorded but then scrapped from ‘Phantomime’ might have been. 

For a teenage me, armed with a £3 travel card and scouring Camden Market for patches, pins and second-hand CDs every weekend, the Misfits’ skull face logo was a draw in itself. A battered copy of ‘Famous Monsters’ led eventually to tracking down the ‘lost’ debut, easily found wedged in an ex-boyfriend’s brother’s box set. The blast, the sheer ‘what is this!?’ moment is a rare one to feel. The fact is, ‘Static Age’ still sounds amazing now. Sure, it’s a little bit ‘of it’s time’ and can’t really be compared to who Misfits became later, but it’s much more than just an artefact or a rarity to be shoved in a box set. It’s frantic and desperate, a snapshot of a band with nothing to lose trying to make an impact on a crowded scene, but with a hopeful, definite quality. As a debut, it should have received more attention than it was awarded, but thankfully now we get to experience the full force of what they were at the start of their journey right into our bones.

KATE ALLVEY