Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover / Columbia Records

Nina Hagen’s 1982 album NunSexMonkRock stands as one of the most utterly alien, daringly experimental records ever made—and yet, it remains a ghost in our music history books. I’m not exaggerating when I rank it alongside PiL’s Metal Box, Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, even Byrne & Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

NunSexMonkRock doesn’t just rival those albums; it shares DNA with them: an anarchic, boundary-smashing refusal of category.

Make no mistake: NunSexMonkRock is artistically monumental. It doesn’t merely break genre, it pulverises it. It is part punk squall, part operatic psychodrama, all fused together by Hagen’s vocal acrobatics. Yet somehow, this record is almost invisible in post‑punk retrospectives. Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again omits it entirely. The Quietus, The Wire, Pitchfork, Far Out—barely a mention. Online, music blogs approach it warily, as if reading from banned books. Still, the bargain-bin cultists, vinyl obsessives, midnight DJs and hardcore fans preserve it like relics, sleeve‑mint, despite its being pushed to the edge of archives.

What’s even more astonishing is that NunSexMonkRock was recorded while Hagen was heavily pregnant. You can hear it – her voice is elemental, primal, determined beyond belief. Her body was literally vibrating with creation, and that intensity pours into every howl and whisper. It’s like she was channelling not only herself, but the spirit of another forming life. Hagen has said that she wanted to make “the holiest record in the whole wide world” while pregnant, and NunSexMonkRock often sounds like a cosmic exorcism. There’s no separation between biology and divinity here—it’s sacred, profane, maternal, and demonic, all at once.

But you don’t have to take artistic assertion on faith; you only need to listen. The album opens with ‘Antiworld’, a glacial plunge into alarm, with echoing bells, discordant woodwinds, and Hagen’s voice exploding into post‑apocalyptic wailing. It hits like ice water in your ear. Then comes ‘Born in Xixax’, a riff‑driven beast featuring the legendary Chris Spedding; it sticks immediately, as defiantly catchy as ‘All Day and All of the Night’. Hagen snarls her way through some of the most infectious hooks she ever captured on tape.

Next up is ‘Smack Jack’, a frenzied anti‑drug scream voiced from lived experience – her relationship with heroin-addicted Dutch rocker Herman Brood giving the track an authentic edge. The song assaults you with rhythm and binary-laced urgency: radical, raw, yet oddly melodic. And if you think that’s the Outrage Halfway Line, wait for ‘Taitschi‑Tarot’, which unspools like a psychedelic prophecy – minimalist keyboards, ritualistic chanting, dense vocal layering.

If it requires a few spins to sink in, trust me: once it takes root, it coils itself in your brain.

Then there’s ‘Iki Maska’. The dirtiest cut on the album, with a saxophone snarl and gritty guitar that conjures the smell of industrial exhaust. Listening is like inhaling the sludge of urban decay, and yet it lodges an addictive melody in your brain. Finally, ‘Dr Art’ stands alone: shapeless, mysterious, hypnotic—divine delirium. It’s the song that convinced me, at 16 and high on LSD, that I needed to move to Amsterdam, join its squat scene, and find whatever this music was trying to tell me.

Behind all this sonic madness is producer Mike Thorne, a studio genius who took Hagen’s manic vision and sculpted it into hearable structure. Thorne’s production transforms every song into a fractured labyrinth: multi‑tracked vocals swirl; synthesiser lines drift and shimmer; percussion jolts unpredictably. Without his precise ear and fearless creativity, this record could have been unlistenable chaos. Instead it’s an defiantly polished lunacy.

Nina Hagen herself is the centre of the storm. Her voice vaults from Maria Callas’ high soprano to Mercedes McCambridge’s guttural growl within seconds, twisting language, dialect and delivery into performance art. The album is a shrieking mosaic of genres: punk, opera, nouvelle chanson, circus music, chanting, spoken-word – all convening in one shattered vessel. Her lyrics crackle with confrontational intelligence and surreal fantasy. On ‘Born in Xixax’, she hurls cosmic mythology at you; elsewhere, she turns tarot into shimmering incantation. She is completely unreplicable.

What’s remarkable is that Hagen never ventured this far again. NunSexMonkRock was her most extreme statement. Yes, she continued to record, to collaborate, to tour, but the scale of this vortex never came back. Maybe it couldn’t. It’s an album that exists outside of time, spanning 1982, yet sounding like an alien relic rebuilt in 3025. Its themes – political misrule, sexual freedom, personal transformation – resonate still. Her Brezhnev prophecy on the title track, delivered with theatrical venom that year of Soviet decline, aged eerily.

I first discovered NunSexMonkRock by chance: I flicked past it in a $1 bargain crate. The sleeve looked weird, the title sounded bizarre, and people don’t walk around holding bizarre album sleeves in 2025 – so I bought it. The vinyl pressed mint; the gatefold opened to a wash of symbolic collage; Hagen in full clown-punk persona in religious parody. I dropped the needle. Some 15 minutes later, I was gobsmacked.

Over the years, I’ve played it more than any other record while tripping—dosage-only under carefully supervised conditions, of course. (The record still spins fine at 45 RPM.) Once, I left home for Amsterdam shortly after hearing ‘Dr Art’, which was apparently based on the mythic punk graffiti artist Ivar Vičs, known as Dr Rat, who died at only 21. I found him mythologised in the squatter community around the Wyers squat near Central Station. People spoke of him in reverent whispers; somehow, Hagen’s voice summoned him decades after his death.

Yet the world around us hasn’t caught up. NunSexMonkRock remains mostly plugged in underground. Streaming services offer it—if you search for it; else it’s buried behind algorithmic invisibility. Music criticism grudgingly acknowledges Nina Hagen as a “quirky punk diva”, but rarely excavates the album this far. That makes sense in one way: NunSexMonkRock is structurally unwieldy. It needs adventurous listening. But it also means that new generations miss it.

And that is why this album still matters. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a challenge. It’s an artwork that confronts aesthetics, gender, national identity, genre and the medium of recorded sound itself. It’s an operatic manifesto wearing punk’s leather jacket. It’s beautiful and bizarre, melodic yet monstrous. It gives you something fierce to carry.

Forty‑odd years on, NunSexMonkRock hasn’t lost an ounce of feral electricity. It shocks, befuddles, and excites. It is still utterly untamed. That it remains obscure is less a crime than a testament to the limits of mainstream music culture. But for anyone seeking real creative freedom in recorded sound, for anyone unafraid to be unsettled, the album is still waiting, fierce as ever.

Play it loud.