Sulk  by The Associates

In 1982, the year when the Scottish band Associates recorded and released their second album, Sulk, was a year when synth-pop in Great Britain had distinguished itself from new wave and created its own self-luminous and autonomous musical genre.

Through the ten compositions of Sulk, the Associates show that one foot stands on synth-pop and the other on post-punk, which is the evolution of new wave in the early 1980s. Producer Mike Hedges called the four members of the Associates to the Playground studio, which was nothing more than an old warehouse owned by Hedges, and there Sulk was recorded in early 1982. Four months after the album's release, the co-founder of the band, Alan Rankine, left the Associates as the other co-founder, Billy Mackenzie, refused to travel in order to promote the album, which, in the meantime, had reached No. 10 in the UK!

The two singles from the album were Party Fears Two and Club Country, which reached the highest positions ever achieved by a single from the group in the UK, namely No. 9 and No. 13, respectively. Sulk remained on the British charts for 20 weeks, while many British magazines supported and praised it. The sound of Sulk was 100% the sound of its time, and for this reason, listening to this particular album offers a completely old-fashioned atmosphere, which was the dominant trend in the early eighties.