My War

With Unicorn gone, the band was free to release the songs it had written since 1981. It had no bassist, so Ginn played bass under the pseudonym Dale Nixon and rehearsed with Bill Stevenson for up to eight hours a day. Stevenson learned to let the rhythm ooze out, in what the band called the socialist groove. Spot recorded it, with Ginn and Stevenson also credited as producers, and the band went into the studio about $200,000 in debt.

Side one has six fast tracks, among them the title song and I Love You. Side two is three tracks of more than six minutes each: Nothing Left Inside, Three Nights and Scream. Rollins told Suburban Voice that Three Nights is about a divorce of self. Ginn told the same fanzine that Black Flag was just a band and that he had no wish to be like Flipper.

Tim Yohannon of Maximumrocknroll wrote that it was like Black Flag doing an imitation of Iron Maiden imitating Black Flag on a bad day. Ira Robbins at Trouser Press called it a mediocre album with some interminably long songs. Rollins answered the metal charge by saying that without the metal what remained was just heavy. Mudhoney's Steve Turner said the record made the Melvins slow to a crawl, and Cobain put it in his list of top fifty albums.