Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Robert Christgau
The Observer
Paste	favorable
Pitchfork Media	9.2/10
Prefix	9.0/10
The Quietus	very favorable
Spin	favorable
The Daily Telegraph

Black Monk Time is the debut studio album by Germany-based American rock band The Monks. It was released in March 1966 through Polydor Records and was the only album released during the band's original incarnation. The album's subversive style and lyrical content was radical for its time and today is considered an important landmark in the development of punk rock.

The album was produced by Jimmy Bowien and recorded March 1965 in Cologne, Germany. "Complication" b/w "Oh, How to Do Now" was released as a single to promote the album. Like the album, it failed to garner commercial success. The single was re-issued in 2009 by Play Loud! Productions.

The album was initially released to a muted critical and commercial reception, but has since gone on to become widely critically acclaimed and is now viewed as an important protopunk album. Anthony Carew in a retrospective review for About.com called it "possibly the first punk record, and is the obvious birthplace of krautrock" and "one of the 'missing links' of alternative music history".The Daily Telegraph wrote, "Listening to it now, finally, in full, remastered glory, it's hard to imagine how this primitive and often nightmarish music could have been allowed to be made at that particular time and place. [...] It may not be to every taste but, lurching according to its own sublimely clueless logic, it has a purity and heedlessness which can never be repeated." Uncut wrote, "there's really nothing that can dull the impact of hearing the Monks' music for the first time."

Black Monk Time was described in the mid-1990s by Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes as a "lost classic". Of the album's raw style, and the context of its production, Cope writes:

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Wikipedia