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Back in the day, I didn’t understand the lyrics, but that didn’t stop them from understanding me. The first time I heard the album, it was on a copied cassette handed over like contraband. I must’ve been ten. The tape was scratched and barely audible, but when the guitars started clawing at the silence and the voice screamed like a call to arms, something cracked open in me. I had no words for what I felt, only a heat that matched the sound. And in that noise, I found something that felt like home, even if home had no space for girls like me.
Every time that opening riff hit, I felt like my bones were learning a new language. Rage spoke for me before I ever spoke English. I didn’t know who the guys in the band were, or why the man on the album cover was on fire, but I knew it mattered. That flame wasn’t destruction. It was defiance. And even if I couldn’t name the chords or repeat the words, I knew this wasn’t music for the background. This was something else. Something that stirred. That burned. That saved.
A true jewel [1997 edit]
Growing up, the album became more than a rebellious artifact. It became a mirror. It played during the moments when I didn’t know how to scream. It filled the silence when speaking up wasn’t safe. With every track, I carved out a version of myself that refused to stay quiet. It didn’t matter that the band’s politics eventually clashed with mine, or that their message made me uncomfortable as I learned more. What mattered was what they gave me when nothing else could.
Later on, I found the same album on vinyl. I had a real record player by then, a space of my own, and a little more language to hold all that memory. I put the needle down and listened, not out of nostalgia, but out of need. The songs were the same, but I wasn’t. Still, they held me. They reminded me that the noise had meaning, that distortion could be a kind of clarity. And though my views had shifted, and though my country had shown me what unchecked rage could become, I couldn’t help but keep listening. Not to them, but to her. The girl who first heard them. The one who knew, even in confusion, that something in this mattered.
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Eventually I stopped trying to explain why I still loved that album. I stopped apologizing for feeling connected to it. Some things aren’t meant to be clean. Some things just live in us. This wasn’t about the band anymore. It wasn’t about their message or their politics or even their fire. It was about mine. The quiet kind. The one I hid for years, the one I named later, but felt early. That record, Wrecks of Ending Machines, as I first misread it, was the first thing that ever said to me, without needing to speak my language, I see you. And honestly, that was enough.
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