Liars - They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top (LP) - Random Colour Vinyl

Brooklyn had a particular throb in 2001, and Liars caught it on tape. They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top arrived on October 30, 2001 via Gern Blandsten, the scrappy New Jersey label that knew a good racket when it heard one. The lineup was the original four, the version of Liars you saw stuffed onto tiny stages around the city: Angus Andrew, an Australian transplant, barking and yelping like he’d swallowed a transistor radio; Aaron Hemphill slashing at guitar and synth; Pat Noecker throwing down elastic bass lines; Ron Albertson locking the whole thing to a martial, dance-floor pulse. It was the sound of post-punk grafted onto party muscle, equally ready for a gallery opening and a warehouse afters.

“Grown Men Don’t Fall in the River, Just Like That” sets the rules right away. The drums are clipped and dry, the guitar is all angles, and the bass keeps moving like it knows the way out. Then “Mr. Your on Fire, Mr.” levels up the tension with a bass line that sways like a subway car and Andrew’s voice spitting slogans that somehow feel communal rather than confrontational. People called it dance-punk because you could move to it, but the power is in the small details, the way a hi-hat jab becomes a hook, or how a single-note guitar line can feel like a siren.

There’s humor and history baked in. “Tumbling Walls Buried Me in the Debris with ESG” wears its influences on its sleeve, tipping the cap to the Bronx legends who understood groove as architecture. “Loose Nuts on the Velodrome” clicks and rattles like bike chains on cinderblock. “We Live NE of Compton” toys with geography and identity while pulling one of the record’s stealthiest earworms out of a two-chord grind. Even the titles feel like part of the performance, little pieces of concrete poetry tossed over a pile of taut rhythm and static.

Sonically, the album stays raw but never thin. You can almost feel the room air around the kit, which suits Albertson’s straight-ahead pulse, and the guitars aren’t fussed over so much as flung into place. That rawness gives the low end room to bloom, and it’s a huge part of why this record hits so well on wax. If you’ve only streamed it, track down They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top vinyl and let those bass lines breathe. Liars vinyl tends to reward volume, and this one in particular likes to sit just past the point your neighbors would prefer.

The curveball is the closer, “This Dust Makes That Mud,” which runs for roughly half an hour and plays like a dare. It repeats, it lurches, it tests patience in a way that felt right in the moment, when bands were willing to push a club set from frenzy to hypnosis. Fans like to argue whether that long tail is trolling or trance. Either way, it reframes everything that came before it, turning a lean, barbed record into a meditation on repetition. It’s a move that foretells Liars’ habit of shedding skin—by their next phase, they’d reconfigure the lineup and start pursuing something darker and more ritualistic—but this debut keeps the body heat of a band still fully in love with the grind.

The critical buzz hit quickly. Early write-ups from places like Pitchfork and the British press clocked it as a bright flare in New York’s new wave of rhythm-heavy guitar music, and the UK release on Blast First in 2002 helped the word spread. You can draw a crooked line from here to the wider dance-punk moment, but the album really stands on its own quirks—the ESG nods, the clipped mantras, the feeling that a borrowed PA and a few friends could overthrow a room.

If you’re crate-digging, this is a keeper. It sits nicely next to The Rapture or early Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but it’s got its own stubborn personality. If you need a nudge, buy Liars records online and start here, then chase down other Liars albums on vinyl as the band gets stranger and more ceremonial. And if you’re in a Melbourne record store flipping through a new arrivals bin—vinyl records Australia has been kind to the early 2000s NYC section—this sleeve is the one that seems to hum before the needle even drops.