Damaged

Black Flag had tried at least twice to cut a full album with Morris, Reyes and Cadena. Selections from those sessions became the Jealous Again and Six Pack EPs and the Louie Louie single, and the leftovers filled Everything Went Black. By the time of Damaged, Cadena had moved to rhythm guitar and Rollins, a Washington, DC singer, had been hired a few weeks before the sessions began.

The record was made at Unicorn Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, in a building where the band was also living and rehearsing. Spot, the engineer who had worked with the band and SST since their early years, was credited as producer and engineer with the band, with Francis Buckley engineering and mixing. Spot did not like the two-guitar line-up and later said the band wanted the rough sound. The backing tracks were laid down without Rollins. He added vocals afterward with Ginn and Dukowski coaching him. Two songs were the hardest: Dukowski's What I See, whose spoken bridge Dukowski wrote out when Rollins could not improvise one he liked, and TV Party, which has backing vocals from the whole band. Robo's bracelets rattle on the snare. The Rise Above on the album was cut earlier with Rollins as a planned single. The closer, Damaged I, was Rollins's first writing credit with the band, and the first of two takes was used.

The cover photograph is by Ed Colver. It shows Rollins punching a mirror, which was cracked with a hammer beforehand, with red ink and coffee standing in for blood.

Unicorn pressed 25,000 copies. In September 1981 MCA's president Al Bergamo refused to distribute the record, telling the Los Angeles Times he found it an anti-parent record. Black Flag visited the pressing plant and stuck a sticker with his words over the MCA logo. SST and Unicorn then distributed the record through an independent distributor. Unicorn sued for breach of contract and the band was barred from recording under its name for almost two years. A 1982 European edition on RoadRacer swapped in the later single version of TV Party, and the first CD reissue added the Jealous Again EP.

Critics and the public largely ignored it when it came out. Christgau wrote in the Village Voice in January 1982 that Ginn was the greatest noise guitarist since Johnny Thunders and that Rollins could snarl along any tortured contour. Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums entry credits it with defining Los Angeles hardcore. Pitchfork, in a 2017 review, called Rollins's voice what lifts the record to its place as a cornerstone of punk. Vice asked in 2017 why the album had left so little mark on the sound of hardcore. It stood at 340 on Rolling Stone's 2012 list and 487 on the 2020 revision, and Pitchfork put it at 25 on its list of the best albums of the 1980s. It is in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.