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Source	Rating
AllMusic
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Pitchfork Media	9.2/10
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin Alternative Record Guide	10/10
The Village Voice	A−

Damaged is the debut studio album by the American hardcore punk band Black Flag. SST Records released it on December 5, 1981.

Over the years since the album's original release it has been recognized as a punk classic and one of the most influential punk records ever made by appearing on a number of "best of" lists by punk fans and critics alike. In 2003, the album was ranked number 340 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.Pitchfork Media also ranked it number 25 on its list of the Top 100 Albums of the 1980s.

Black Flag had made at least two cancelled attempts to record a full-length album since the release of its first extended play Nervous Breakdown, with singers Keith Morris, Ron Reyes, and Dez Cadena; some of the Reyes sessions became the Jealous Again EP, while selections from two of many Cadena sessions became the Six Pack EP and the "Louie Louie"/"Damaged I" single; other session outtakes would later comprise the Everything Went Black double album. At the time of the recording, Cadena had moved to rhythm guitar (a position he had initially intended to take when Reyes was still in the band) and 20-year-old Washington, DC expatriate Henry Rollins had become the band's new lead singer weeks before the sessions occurred. Unlike Reyes, who had never sung in a studio before and Cadena, who had not even sung at all before joining the band, Rollins already had one recording credit to his name with the short-lived DC hardcore punk band State of Alert, who recorded No Policy, an EP released earlier that year on Dischord Records.

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