Barely Legal

by

The Hives

Edit

Barely Legal is an album released in September 1997 by a then-unknown Swedish group called The Hives, from Fagersta, Sweden. The album's title was a reference to their age, as all of the five members but one (the lead guitarist, Nicholaus Arson) had very recently turned 18, the same age that one may legally appear in a pornographic film.

The album itself shows the band at the peak of teen angst and its erratic, hyper-speed nature may find fans of the band's later albums shocked at how much the band's musical direction changed over the course of a decade. Unlike the aforementioned successors to Barely Legal, this album was not met with any significant commercial success because The Hives had not yet toured extensively outside of Sweden; the Garage Rock Revolution started by The Strokes, European hipsters, and video music networks did not yet exist; and their sound at this juncture was likely too abrasive to garner considerable mainstream success.

The album shows influence of hardcore punk and rockabilly. The album makes varied references to politics in songs such as Automatic Schmuck, which is a revolt against being a working-class stiff and Theme from..., which deals with poorly-directed attempts at fame, as well as a philosophical look at the effects of time in Well, Well, Well, but the album mostly consists of songs expressing teenage angst.

The album's second track, "A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T", had a video produced, but it was not commercially released until it was included as an extra on some pressings of Your New Favourite Band. The band later recorded an EP-single by the same name and featuring the same song, which saw the band in similar form before moving to the proto-punk influenced Veni Vidi Vicious sound two years later.

The album sleeve features three quotations from fake newspaper reviews. These quotations are originally from British newspapers referring to the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World.