1977 is the first official album by Ash, released in May 1996 in the United Kingdom and the following month in the US. The punk rock influenced album proved popular in the UK and Ireland, and to a lesser degree elsewhere, where Britpop was a smaller cult phenomenon. It is ranked at 417 on the NME poll of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

In 2008 Tim Wheeler remembered:

We'd literally left school six months before... It was insane, just a totally mental time. It was the first time we had a residential time in a studio, and they had all the meals for you and you could just stay up. We just got very nocturnal and very crazy. [Producer] Owen Morris had been not so gradually introducing us to drugs, so we were off our heads a lot of the time! One of the dumbest thing we did was we recorded this track called The Scream. We spent three days working on it. We built up 48 tracks that started out like a murmur up to full on screaming. I was on acid one time dancing to it. By the time we got to the end of it we were too scared to mix it. Sick Party was originally one of the tracks we were adding to this melange of noise, but we kept listening to it and it turned out to be so funny we ended up using it on its own.

The title refers to a year of three events that shaped the band: the births of two of the band-members; the year the first punk albums were released (especially Damned Damned Damned and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols); and the release of Star Wars. The album opens with the sound of a TIE fighter, and ends with the track "Darkside Lightside", the title of which is a Star Wars reference, and which climaxes with a choral version of the Star Wars theme. The band also covered "Cantina Band", as the b-side to the "Girl From Mars" single.

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