“I am frequently stopped on the street by people who tell me, ‘Your album changed my life,’ or some variant. I don’t have to ask, ‘Which album?’ because it is implied that they’re talking about the first one.” So says Brian Ritchie, Violent Femmes’ bass player and cofounder, about his band’s 1983 debut, which over time has become a cult classic.

When it was released, the band – who were discovered by The Pretenders in 1981, when they were playing a show in Milwaukee, Violent Femmes’ home city – were initially compared to odd punk-pop acts such as Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers (and progenitors such as Velvet Underground), but they quickly moved on from early reference points to forge their own identity.

It helped that by 1982, aided by their friendship with Chrissie Hynde and company, they had travelled from Milwaukee to New York to open for bands such as Richard Hell and the Voidoids. The New York music press loved them – “they blow a fresh wind of post-punk originality rooted in rockabilly simplicity, the dry, folk twang of Dylan and the graphic lyricism of Lou Reed,” Musician magazine wrote – and within a year they had recorded and released their self-titled debut.

As befits a big anniversary, this reissue includes some extra tracks – demos and live performances – but the core attraction is the album itself, a minimalist expression of insolent teenage angst wrapped up in primitive surging acoustic strums.