Adolescents, also known as The Blue Album due to its cover design, is the debut studio album by American punk rock band the Adolescents, released in April 1981 on Frontier Records. Recorded after guitarist Rikk Agnew and drummer Casey Royer joined the band, it features several songs written for their prior group, the Detours, including "Kids of the Black Hole" and "Amoeba", which became two of the Adolescents' most well-known songs. Adolescents was one of the first hardcore punk albums to be widely distributed throughout the United States, and became one of the best-selling California hardcore albums of its time. The original lineup consisted of singer Tony Brandenburg (who used the stage name Tony Cadena), bassist Steve Soto, guitarists Frank Agnew and John O'Donovan, and a drummer who went by the stage name Peter Pan. They began performing locally and recorded their first demo tape that March.

O'Donovan and Pan both left the band in June 1980. "Kids of the Black Hole" describes Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness' Fullerton apartment, a graffiti-covered drug den that was a hangout for punks and a site for parties, sex, and violence. "To me, it is one of the greatest punk rock songs of all time", said Soto in 2014, "and of course 'Amoeba' was catchy as fuck, and everybody wants to hear it, but to me, 'Kids of the Black Hole' was like Quadrophenia for us." They recorded a third demo that July with Chaz Ramirez and Eddie Joseph of local band Eddie and the Subtitles as audio engineers. Amoeba' by the Adolescents is the song", she later said. "Definitely was a phenomenon. 'Amoeba' is a masterpiece of a single from any era of rock music." Engineered and mixed by Thom Wilson and produced by Middle Class bassist Mike Patton (not to be confused for the Faith No More vocalist), it was recorded, mixed and mastered in only four days and featured most of the band's oeuvre at the time, including songs from their demos and Royer and Rikk Agnew's Detours songs. "L.A. Girl", a new song, was written by Brandenburg in response to being rejected by a new classmate who had come to Magnolia High School from Los Angeles after her parents divorced. "She made it very clear that I didn't breathe the same atmosphere as her", he recalled 26 years later. "I was trying to tell her we were on the same page, that I was her only ally. But like pretty much all the girls then, she just thought I was a dork, an insect."

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Adolescents was released in April 1981. "Oddly enough, we'd never even made it out of California", Frank Agnew later said.

The Adolescents' Blue Album lineup reunited several times in subsequent years. The first was a reunion show in April 1986 at Fender's Ballroom in Long Beach, California, which led to the band re-forming. They reunited again in 2001 for more live performances, but Royer soon left, and Rikk Agnew left as well in 2003.

Writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1998, Mike Boehm included Adolescents first in a list of "Essential Albums, '78–'98" giving an overview of Orange County punk and alternative rock, calling it "an underground classic. The 13 songs defined the O.C. punk experience, back when punk was a beleaguered subculture. 'Amoeba', with lyrics by Royer, is a metaphoric account of a single-celled creature, read punk youth culture, growing in size and self-awareness under the scornful, dismissive eye of adult authority. 'Kids of the Black Hole' was Rikk Agnew's epic tribute to the hedonistic, comradely denizens of a Fullerton crash pad that cradled the fertile North County punk scene during 1979–80. The two songs introduced a massed, harmonized 'octave guitar' blitz—an Orange County rock signature."

Covers

In the decades since its release, several artists have recorded cover versions of songs from Adolescents. In 2005, NOFX covered "No Way" for their 7" of the Month Club while the Dropkick Murphys covered "Who Is Who" for the soundtrack to the video game Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. In 2009, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker of Blink-182 covered "Amoeba" for the soundtrack to the film Endless Bummer, while Pulley covered "Wrecking Crew" and the Briefs covered "Who Is Who" for Let Them Know: The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records.

Track listing

Writing credits adapted from the album's liner notes.

| title14 = Welcome to Reality

| length14 = 2:11

| title15 = Losing Battle

| length15 = 1:35

| title16 = Things Start Moving

| length16 = 3:06

Personnel

Credits adapted from the album's liner notes.