The Ruts' only studio album captures British punk at its most musically adventurous, fusing three-chord fury with reggae's rhythmic possibilities. Malcolm Owen's vocals snarl through Babylon's Burning and Jah War with working-class urgency, while the band's dub-conscious arrangements prove punk could absorb Caribbean influence without losing its bite.

Recorded at Wessex Sound Studios months before Owen's fatal overdose in 1980, The Crack remains a bittersweet document of punk's second wave, when the genre began looking beyond its initial limitations toward something more expansive and street-level real.