Soul-Crusher

Soul-Crusher is the debut studio album by American rock band White Zombie, released independently in November 1987 by Silent Explosion.

Despite its initially limited release and the band's relatively unknown status, the album gained the admiration of musicians such as Kurt Cobain,[2] Iggy Pop,[3][4] and Thurston Moore.

They decided to recruit Wharton Tiers, who had previously been associated with noise rock bands such as Pussy Galore and Sonic Youth, to produce and engineer the record.

The record's sound has been described as "Beefheart in painfully tight trousers trying to scream his way over Sonic Youth and The Birthday Party playing different songs in the same room.

Guay also created entire tracks of guitar feedback and noise, which didn't relate to any of the songs, that the band would proceed to layer over the album.

[11] The concept for the front and back cover was conceived by Rob in sketch form and executed by Michael Lavine, who had previously worked with White Zombie on Psycho-Head Blowout.

In her book I'm in the Band, Sean recalled that "critics seemed to enjoy Rob's psychotic lyrics, so much so that their entire review would try to emulate his style, which was entertaining".

[4] Billy Lucas and David Stubbs of Melody Maker praised the artwork, lyrics, "slammer guitars", and "scrawling vocals" on the album.

In a retrospective review, Bradley Torreano of AllMusic praised the lyrics and deemed it "a prime slab of noise rock that has aged shockingly well" and that "Zombie fans might not even like this that much, but no less of an authority than Kurt Cobain himself pointed to this period in their career as one of his biggest influences".