Exit Planet Dust is the debut studio album by our favorites and yours, psychedelic/dance legends The Chemical Brothers. It’s probably become their most underrated record over the past few decades. Even people who don’t know the music know the name but not enough folks know this first record. They changed the landscape of electronic music, both in studio and through early contributions to developing the now ubiquitous big room live electronica concert. Most fans of either psychedelic music or dance music have enjoyed something from their vast discography. In my opinion there’s something for everyone there, from the rest of their genre defining sample heavy 90s albums to their prodigious feature-packed productions of the last fifteen years.

By the time their debut record arrived in ’95, the duo of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands had finding success DJing as “The Dust Brothers”  for a good three years. Remixes they’d made and early singles that would later lead this album such as “Song To The Siren” and “Chemical Beats”  received widespread play at raves. They were playing festivals across europe, toured the US with Underworld and Orbital, and were already developing a more live, loop based dj set. That’s why Exit Planet Dust (a reference to their legally mandated name change) is pretty fully formed and ambitious for a debut record. It was pretty damn successful as well.

Regardless of the massive influence that this record has, it’s a very interesting and varied album of dance music. Everything that defines The Chemical Brothers is here. The foundation is classic instrumental hip hop. There’s a great deal of appreciation for classic and (at the time) contemporary psychedelic music, particularly from the UK. Sample selection and manipulation is practiced as a true art form with a lot of inspiration from The Beastie Boys. The processing of the samples is incredibly creative and honestly mystifying. It’s all mixed together with the synths and such in a masterful and seamless way.

Exit Planet Dust has a completeness to it that echoes the best psychedelic records (and trips) in a way that few singles-oriented dance acts were doing. It opens with the iconic “Leave Home” which is a slow builder with a dramatic start. It finishes with an emotional finale in “Alive Alone” which finds their first of many vocal features in the iconic folk/inditronica musician Beth Orton. In between there’s all-time genre defining big beat, genre blurring psychedelica, and what remains one of my favorite downtempo tracks ever made.

I love that this debut album contains everything essentially Chemical Brothers without spoiling for the modem listener their next 30 years of records and the surprises they hold. Over time Exit Planet Dust has developed a pleasantly old school feeling while still remaining fresh enough to move crowds. It’s intricate psychedelic headphone candy that still booms out of big speakers with enough force to level a dancefloor. If you don’t know it, get it. The brothers gonna work it out.