MASSIVE #TBT rewind today.
This week marks 10 years since the release of one of drum & bass’s most influential albums this century: Pendulum – Hold Your Colour.
Their debut opus, Hold Your Colour reinforced what keen followers had already suspected from early singles such as Spiral and Back 2 U… Capturing the young trio at their rawest and totally free from any expectations, Hold Your Colour smelted everything we knew about drum & bass at the time down and repurposed it with their own rock-referenced, tempo-shattering vision.
Featuring unavoidable multiple scene-smashing anthems such as Tarantula and Fasten Your Seatbelts, Pendulum – Hold Your Colour set the foundations for the rest of the decade. While the album enjoyed official chart positions (29 in the UK album charts and 40 in their native Australia) its real success was its influence on almost every bass music producer that has emerged since. Not just within drum & bass, but artists such as AWE to My Nu Leng have cited the album’s strong influence on them in interviews on this very site alone.
With its full-frontal dynamics and rock influences, for readers under 25 this is likely to be that album that recoded your brain, helped you make sense of your tastes and requirements from music and set your electronic path in stone (in the same way Fat Of The Land, Wormhole or Colours did to those of us a few years before)
If you’re over 25 then you should remember this album clearly… And know how much some of these tracks were absolutely hammered during 2005/2006 and indeed 2007 when the deluxe album dropped. While all the genre’s hallmark reference and production points were clear and consistent, this genuinely sounded like nothing else at the time.
Enough nostalgia guff now. If your copy is somewhere out there in the vast nothingness of space… Here’s the Spotify link. Salute!
