OH MY GOD THATS THE FUNKY SHIT!
There is not a single bad track on this entire album. Every track rocks.
Up there with Dummy and Different Class in the triumvirate of British 90s music.
its a total banger
I think a lot of people don’t realise just how much this utterly shifted the British music scene
Ok there was electronic music before it and after it, but this was Sex Pistols level of ground-breaking at the time
It was the first prodigy album I heard as a kid and it changed my perception of electronic music
It’s a classic. Back to back bangers. Even some of the more “out there” songs like Narayan. Though there’s barely any albums I don’t like from them. Maybe “Experience” because it’s a little much sometimes. Quite partial to “Invaders Must Die” and “No Tourists” since I grew up with IMD and because NT is their last album before Keith died (RIP)
Invaders Must Die is so good but Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned is another good one, mainly because of Juliette Lewis.
Oh yea lots of bangers on there too. Spitfire, Girls and You’ll Be Under My Wheels are my faves
It sounds modern, mainly because modern electronic music was so heavily affected by Prodigy
Coooommmmmeee plaaaay myyyy game
I can hear this comment
I went through a big prodigy phase in my teens (still listen often). I once had the house to myself so I loaded up the backyard surround sound system (living with some rich friends at the time, we did not have backyard surround sound money) with 6 CDs of prodigy. Got really stoned and then floated around in the pool with their small dog on my lap for hours. Probably one of the best single days of my life. Just pure glorious relaxation. Leisure on a level I have been chasing for the rest of my life lol.
Great album, I slightly prefer invaders must die over it but i’d put it on par with music for the jilted generation for different reasons though (like both complement each other I’d say)
Back when Quake came out and Team Fortress Classic as well you could remove the game CD and put in a music CD of your choice for an alternative soundtrack, and this was my go to. Flippin’ astrology, rocket jump with Prodigy. Diesel Power is still on my workout playlist.
Controversial opinion: It’s the album that ruined Prodigy.
Experience and Jilted Generation are amazing and I love every track.
Their first two albums were everything I loved about the genre. As soon as Smack My Bitch Up started getting radio play, they shifted their sound to match and never looked back.
I can appreciate their later stuff but I agree that the first two albums are better. You might say they are rougher and under produced but they captured the sound of underground at the time. You look back at a lot of the early music that came out of the rave scene and it’s almost naive in its production but will always be special to me.
Funny you say that, I always felt like the previous two albums felt kind of empty, almost as if the production wasn’t finished. I felt like that at the time it came out too, and there were better, more “complete” contemporary works in the genre (although hardly any had airplay at the time).
This had a new energy and felt every bit the polished album that they were due. Then the radio stations played it to death.
One man’s polished is another man’s over-produced.
Clearly the sound of this album resonated more with the mainstream, but I always felt like the addition of so much distortion, both to the sampling and to the synth, started to get away from what I liked about the genre. The pure waves of the digital instruments are why I liked techno. I had analog genres of music if I wanted to listen to something dirty sounding.
I can see that. I came to the thread thinking that this album is great but the downside is that it got so big and influential that it overshadowed the first two albums, which is a shame because they are very different than Fat of the Land but still so good. Experience and Music for the Jilted Generation deserve more attention. Hackers is such a formative movie for me and a big part of it is it’s soundtrack and prodigy is a big part of it.
For me it would be “ruined” in quotes, I don’t blame them for changing their style, musicians change and want to do something different, just sad that there is no more old prodigy.
But I have to make a disclaimer, I didn’t listen to anything after The Fat of the Land, so my knowledge is limited. (The reason is because I got introduced to prodigy at the time of the first 3 albums but didn’t follow up on them, but that is normal for me, never follow up on bands)
I considered writing “the album that ruined Prodigy for me” but decided to stick with the more inflammatory version. 🤣
Fantastic album, like others have said, it was on heavy rotation in my teens, sounds track to many late night game sessions.
“Smack my Bitch Up” being a hugely popular and influential song, is also part of a long running lost media hunt for me. In the late 00’s there was a youtube video made by a 3d animator as a demo reel. It was an extended anime fight between a yellow and black sentai/robot and a bunch of other robots. SMBU was the soundtrack to the video of course, lots of bits were synced to it.
That was back in the glorious pre-copyright-bot times, and since it was a demo for an unreleased project using a hugely popular song by someone who’s name I’ve long forgotten, I can’t find it! Probably scrubbed off the net by now, the creator moved on to being a cog in the Marvel movie machine.
Certified iridium banger for a reason, without question. My favorite track, voodoo people (pendulum mix) isn’t on this, but I still sing the chant from Narayan. Just as influential as most of the early works of Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers, the Bassbin Twins, the Crystal Method, Fluke, and so many others. The remix album of this is still just as devastating.
Once you heard pretty much any one of these tracks, you knew this was, and probably always would be, the sound for you.
