Bad Brains
Are You Ready
TRUST
To have seen Bad Brains in 1980 and 1981 was to have experienced something so unique, so explosive, so electro-orgasmic, so defying of gravity and common sense that even today—the better part of half a century later—those of us who witnessed that seizure, that mashing of skill and speed and rhythm and physical and musical acrobatics, can’t find the right words to describe it. But I’ll ask you to imagine this: four Slinkys, wrapped together yet refusing to tangle, twisted until their breaking point, then exploding in a barbed fury—and doing it again 18 seconds later. Oh, and they’re a rock band, playing faster and tighter than any group you’ve ever seen before.
Anyone who was there—and I say that not to introduce the snobbery of old age into the conversation, but to underline the fact of bearing witness—will likely agree that Bad Brains never truly caught that on vinyl. Certainly, every recording they released honors some aspect of it, but for sundry reasons—quick or muffled production, subdued performance, weird mixing or re-mixing choices, less than primo material—no front-to-back Bad Brains album did anything but draw a chalk outline around that atomic dime-snap, whip-cracked, gnashed-teeth tornado that the band brought to the stage in the very early 1980s (if only Ed Stasium or—even better—Vic Maille had gotten a shot at producing circa-1981 Bad Brains!). Instead, we’re always looking for clues, something that evokes that 38-minute defibrillator whack we felt so long ago.
So it’s with some interest that we unpack Are You Ready, which offers us six songs Bad Brains recorded in March of 1979, five of which have never been released in any official capacity before. And here’s where we cut to the chase, which I do with tremendous admiration for one of our country’s greatest, most original, and most influential bands: Are You Ready is an interesting, even sometimes great, set of songs, and it’s truly exciting to feel like you’re peering into the frantic, fiery-hot nursery where modern hardcore-punk is being born. However, this new collection is made virtually redundant—except as a historical footnote—by Black Dots, another early archival studio session originally released on Caroline Records in 1996. That collection was recorded just 10 weeks later, and it featured 16 tracks.
On every level, Black Dots is far better: more songs, more incendiary performances, and the sense that Bad Brains feel more comfortable both in the studio and inside the extraordinary new sound they were inventing, like, a cherry bomb inside of a can of nails inside of a rock band. As happy as I am that Are You Ready exists (and that it testifies to the continued interest in Bad Brains in 2026), it’s a significantly lesser experience than the compelling and explosive collection the band released 30 years ago to the month. Black Dots comes far closer to providing aural evidence of the incredible, almost indescribable tsunami of invention and energy that was Bad Brains at their best.
