People don't buy and comb through every lyric and riff of this album the same way they do Power, Corruption, and Lies or Entertainment!, but it's aged just as gracefully, retaining its original power.Ĭonnecting all these disparate stylistic elements is Hynde's singular bravado, a vocal delivery both masculine and feminine, aggressive yet controlled, brash yet vulnerable- contradictions that serve the song first and her persona second. They laid it all out on their self-titled 1979 debut, which includes some of their best songs: the country-inflected 'Kid', the motorbike beat of 'Tattooed Love Boys', the inimitable vocals and slangy lyrics on 'Brass in Pocket', the show-closing 'Mystery Achievement'. Their modest goal, which they handily achieved, was to be a really good rock band: tight, inventive, aggressive, goofy, gutsy, and- perhaps most important- with a particular sound that could be readily identified as the Pretenders. Also, while most other post-punk bands were experimenters and tinkerers, she was (and remains) a traditionalist, refining instead of redefining rock. They fed off punk's visceral energy, but Hynde was too much of a fervent believer in capital-R Rock to buy into its nihilism. So she hooked up with four guys from Hereford and formed the Pretenders just as punk was fizzling out. She was also desperate to be 'in a band,' a need so strong the liner notes suggest it's pathological. An ex-pat from Akron, singer Chrissie Hynde hung out with the Sex Pistols, scribed for NME, and clerked at Malcolm McLaren's notorious Sex shop. The Pretenders were post-punk chronologically, if not aesthetically.