While it'd be remiss to claim that the Always Outgunned. Thirty years later, there's still nothing else that sounds quite like it. It's all funnelled through a relentless record that barely lets up the pace for an hour of genre-altering chaos. There's also a lovely burst of early-90s house ( Your Love), trippy drum 'n' bass ( Charly), an ingenious inversion of a Max Romeo reggae classic ( Out Of Space) and a progressive, eight-minute instrumental that sounds like a calculus robot having a breakdown on an abandoned planet ( Weather Experience). Sure, they went 'heavier' after this point, but tracks like Jericho, all blaring horns and off-kilter keyboard-mashing, and the pure, psychotic rave-up of Music Reach (1,2,3,4), sound like tracks being played at a backyard rave at Satan's gaff. Not only that, but there are moments on Experience that make for the most straight-up evil that The Prodigy ever sounded. While the influences of the rave scene that bore them are splattered all over The Prodigy's debut album, it still ultimately sounds more like something turned in by a bunch of space travellers who accidentally got sucked through three parallel dimensions on their way home. And with one track in particular, they also unintentionally created the perfect motto to remember Keith by: We Live Forever. As unintended tributes go, it serves its purpose perfectly: the ultimate crystallisation of everything The Prodigy had built thus far. Of course, the legacy of No Tourists will always carry an extra emotional weight it was the final Prodigy album released before we lost Keith Flint the following year. The likes of Light Up The Sky, Timebomb Zone, Champions Of London and a deliciously lairy Fight Fire With Fire - featuring scabrous punks Ho99o9 - are all full-throttle pit-starers, merging classic Prodigy trademarks with a modern crunch and groove. Named as a middle-finger towards the also-rans clogging up the 2010s dance scene, at ten tracks and less than 38 minutes in length, it gets in, smashes the shit out of everything around it and disappears again before you've had a chance to take a breath. Where The Day Is My Enemy suffered from being a little on the bloated side, No Tourists had no such issues: this is the tightest, most concise album of The Prodigy's career. Here are all seven Prodigy albums ranked from worst to best. With The Prodigy set to continue after some time off following the shocking death of Keith Flint in 2019, we thought we'd dissect their excellent discography so far. Their incendiary live shows, led primarily by dancers/vocalists Keith and Maxim Reality, soon become the stuff of legend, putting many 'proper' rock and metal bands to shame as they tore stages apart at the likes of Glastonbury, Phoenix, Reading and, eventually, Download. They were as iconic visually as they were musically, Keith Flint's terrifying form shuddering around a disused London tube station in the Firestarter video producing one of the enduring images of the 90s. Their early albums were era-defining, making history by breaking big both in the UK and the US ( The Fat Of The Land hit number 1 on the Billboard 200 over a decade before dance music truly took over the States), and influencing generations of DJs, bands and artists right across the music spectrum.
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