Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin Alternative Record Guide	10/10
Uncut
The Village Voice	B+

Violent Femmes is the debut album by Violent Femmes. Mostly recorded in July 1982, the album was released by Slash Records on vinyl and on cassette in April 1983, and on CD in 1987 with two extra tracks "Ugly" and "Gimme the Car".

In 2002, Rhino Records remastered the album, filled out the disc's length with demos, and added another disc of live tracks and a radio interview for a 20th anniversary special edition, with liner notes by Michael Azerrad.

Violent Femmes is the band's most successful album to date and achieved a rare feat by going gold, four years after its release, and later platinum, four years after that, without having yet made an appearance on the Billboard 200 album chart. After achieving platinum certification on February 1, 1991, the album finally entered the Billboard album chart for the first time on August 3, 1991.

Slant Magazine listed the album at #21 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s".

Most of the songs on both this album and its follow-up were written when the songwriter, Gordon Gano, was 18 years old and still in high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Violent Femmes peaked at #171 on Billboard's Top 200 album chart in 1991. The cover model was Billie Jo Campbell, a 3-year-old who was walking down a street in California when she and her mother were approached and offered $100 for the photograph which became the album cover.

In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone, J. D. Considine wrote that Violent Femmes was precocious yet dynamic, with a good balance between Gano's direct lyrics and the full sound of the music.Robert Christgau of The Village Voice compared Gano and the album as a whole to Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers. Gano himself grew tired of comparisons to Richman, as by his own account he was actually trying to sound like Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate.

...
Wikipedia