Highly influential hardcore and Straight Edge band SSD has revealed a new music video and the remastered audio for “Boiling Point”. The classic anthem is the album opener for their long out-of-print classic, The Kids Will Have Their Say, which has long been heralded as the first straight-edge album and a landmark moment in the history of American hardcore. 

Of “Boiling Point,” SSD frontman / vocalist David “Springa” Spring tells, “It’s kind of my epitaph, my intro to the anger I had to keep bottled up as a child. Because at that time in my life, any display of rebellion was met with severe discipline. Looking back on it now in 2023, I believe it’s become an anthem for all the loners who felt like outcasts at their schools and found unity at the gallery of hardcore.”

The Kids Will Have Their Say captures a time and an era in the nascent hardcore scene before there were formulas and posturing. It’s an unfiltered artistic statement that’s singular in scope and vision. The Boston act’s debut was extremely limited, never repressed and has gone on to have a life of its own despite the fact the only affordable way to listen to it has been low quality streams on YouTube. Now, after being out of print for 40 years, the album is going to be available on streaming services for the first time ever and will be released on vinyl by archival label, Trust Records on November 20. 

This deluxe version has been meticulously updated with remastered audio and a painstaking recreation of the iconic cover art, courtesy of Bryan Ray Turcotte. Over the years the mythology of the album has only grown—and this reissue of the album is sure to introduce this prescient and powerful collection of songs  to a new generation of fans who never had the opportunity to see the original lineup of guitarist Al Barile, vocalist David “Springa” Spring, bassist Jaime Sciarappa and drummer Chris Foley perform live. 

Today SSD is pleased to announce that for the first time in 25 years, all four original members will reunite under the same roof for a special meet and greet in Boston to celebrate the reissue. The event takes place on November 22 at Newbury Comics (348 Newbury St.) from 3-5PM

Considered to be the 1st Straight Edge band, SSD formed in Boston in 1981. The band quickly gained notoriety within the local music scene for intense, charged performances and the provocative antics of their core group of followers, the Boston Crew.  In 1982, they released their debut LP The Kids Will Have Their Say on their own XClaim and Ian MacKaye’s Dischord label. An estimated 1900 copies were pressed and quickly sold out – currently an original copy of the album sells for an average of $2,000 on Discogs.

“We only did one pressing of 1,900 copies and then I shut it down after the first pressing,” Barile explains. “Even back then within a couple of years if people wanted it they couldn’t get it, but I guess what surprises me is that people still want it. People on YouTube copy it all the time and put it up there and I never once complained to them about copyright violations or stuff like that.” In many ways, SSD launched the hardcore scene in Boston as we know it and the band’s kinship with MacKaye arose out of the fact that both acts refused to conform to society’s still shifting standards at the time. 

Trust Records worked with  Dan Johnson of Audio Achieving Services who remastered the audio from the safety version of the original master tapes. These tapes were cleaned despite extreme mold and water damage. The re-release of The Kids Will have Their Say comes on the heels of the hardcover book SSD: How Much Art Can You Take, which contains over 170 images of the band and has sparked a resurgence of interest in the act who were only around from 1981- 1985. After offers from numerous labels over the years, Barile is the first to point out that it’s ironic that The Kids Will Have Their Say is being reissued on a label called Trust Records.