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Rattlesnakes is the debut album by British group Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, released on 12 October 1984. The album reached number 13 in the UK Album Charts and included the hit singles "Perfect Skin" (#26 in UK), "Forest Fire" (#41 in UK) and "Rattlesnakes" (#65 in UK, #31 in the Netherlands).

"If I hadn't listened to 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' I could never have written 'Perfect Skin'. I was totally drunk on Dylan at the time I wrote that song and all the imagery is deliberately Dylanesque. I thought, 'why not be blatant?' The only difference is, Dylan would have written a song like 'Perfect Skin' in an hour. It took me a week!"

The bulk of the album was written by frontman Lloyd Cole, who formed the band while a student at the University of Glasgow. Cole cites Bob Dylan and Booker T. & the MGs as major influences, but also notes the impact of his studies in English and philosophy on both the album's title, a reference to the novel Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and its lyrics, which also reference Renata Adler, Simone de Beauvoir and Norman Mailer.

The album's songs written at Glasgow Golf Club, where Cole's father worked as club master and where the family lived. Cole recalled, "'Perfect Skin'" and 'Forest Fire' were written one weekend in the basement, underneath the golf club where we used to live and my parents used to work. We'd got our publishing deal so we bought a Portastudio, a DX7 and a drum machine. I demo-ed both of them that weekend and we had a record deal within a month of that; it was that quick. Every single song on Rattlesnakes was written within a year of the record coming out."

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