Energy is the only studio album by the American ska punk band Operation Ivy. It was originally released on vinyl and cassette in May 1989 through Lookout! Records with the catalog number LK 010. Although the album itself has never been released on CD, all of the tracks were featured on the career-spanning compilation Operation Ivy issued by Lookout in 1991. Despite achieving no mainstream success, Energy is considered one of the most important albums of ska punk and is frequently cited as an influence by many later bands of the genre.
The album stayed in print on Lookout until 2006, when the band took back its recordings from the label due to unpaid royalties. Guitarist Tim "Lint" Armstrong's label Hellcat Records re-released the original album as a 12-inch LP picture disc in 2004, and in 2007 put out a remastered version of the self-titled compilation. A second vinyl edition was released by Hellcat on April 18, 2012 and debuted at number 13 on the Vinyl Albums chart.
Background and recording
Shortly after returning from a short US tour in June 1988, the band played a show at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California with Crimpshrine, Isocracy and The Lookouts. Following the show, the band stopped at a local burrito shop with Lookout Records owners Larry Livermore and David Hayes to discuss future plans. Livermore and Hayes suggested recording a follow-up EP to their debut Hectic, but the band members revealed that they intended to do a full studio album. Figuring the band was not ready to record an album, and fearing that Lookout did not have enough money to put it out, Livermore and Hayes attempted to talk the band out of their decision, but to no avail. As guitarist Lint would later say, "You can tell Operation Ivy, but you can't tell 'em much."
The original intent was to record the album live at 924 Gilman Street during closed hours with minimal overdubs, with Gilman soundman Radley Hirsch as engineer. "I think they were hoping to capture the electricity and excitement of their live shows, a nice trick if you could manage it", Livermore later said. "But without an audience, Gilman was just a barn-like structure with mediocre acoustics. It lacked soundproofing, isolation booths, a control room and all those features." During recording, however, the band ran into a number of disagreements with Hirsch, such as not wanting Lint to use distortion on his guitar and having bassist Matt McCall use an Ampeg SVT amp that "sounded like Blue Cheer or something." The sessions dragged on for "what seemed like forever" due to the engineer's decision to record overdubs and weeks were spent working on single songs. Livermore was also dissatisfied with the recordings, saying "Some were as good or better than anything Lookout had done, but others just felt... weird." By December 1988, the members were unsure if they wanted to continue working on the album and arranged a band meeting to decide what to do. After agreeing to start over from scratch, Livermore was assigned with the task of firing Hirsch from the project and the band went to Sound and Vision Studios in San Francisco with Kevin Army in January 1989 to re-record the album. Recording went quickly during these sessions, with the band completing basic tracks for the entire album in one day. "It was a live recording, because we went in there and we just went down the list. We weren't really taking breaks at all," according to McCall. "We didn’t want to slow down, we just wanted to get it done because we were on a roll."