Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Christgau's Consumer Guide	A
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Entertainment Weekly	A
Los Angeles Times
MusicHound Rock	4.5/5
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin Alternative Record Guide	9/10

Bricks Are Heavy is the third album by the American rock band L7, released in April 1992 by Slash Records. Backed by the single "Pretend We're Dead", the album became a breakthrough hit and the band became the "poster girls" of grunge music.

The album was released shortly after grunge had broken into the mainstream with the surprise success of Nirvana's Nevermind. In July 1992, the song "Pretend We're Dead" gained popularity among American rock radio stations, where it received regular airplay. By late August, the album had reached No. 1 on Billboard's Heatseekers album chart, and two weeks later it peaked at No. 160 on the Billboard 200.

Musically the album is heavier and dirtier than the band's previous recordings and described as "catchy tunes and mean vocals on top of ugly guitars and a quick-but-thick bottom of cast-iron grunge" by Entertainment Weekly. While the band retained its punk and hardcore punk roots, there was more emphasis on heavy metal than before. It was produced by Butch Vig, who is renowned for his work with bands such as Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth and, later, Garbage.

In a contemporary review for Playboy, Robert Christgau regarded Bricks Are Heavy as an "object lesson in how to advance your music by meeting the marketplace halfway", though he believed it would not sell as much as it deserved. He said Vig helped L7 produce grunge-metal featuring "intense admixtures of ditty and power chord" that "never quite gathers Nirvana's momentum, but it's just as catchy and a touch nastier."Greg Kot was less enthusiastic in the Chicago Tribune, writing that there were not many good songs such as "Slide" and "the performances-while certainly ferocious-aren`t sufficiently varied enough to make up the difference."

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