Chrome's Debut Album Expanded For Special 50th Anniversary Reissue

By Editorial Staff | Published: Feb 17, 2026 1:41 PM EST

Cleopatra Records have shared "Return To Zanzibar", from their forthcoming 50th anniversary reissue of Chrome's 1976 debut album "The Visitation". The label sent over these details:

Amidst the myriad 50th anniversary reissues that have assailed us over the past few years, it's often difficult to single out any that cannot be picked up in their original form for just a few bucks in the used records store of your choosing.

Occasionally, however, one comes along that can't be found in the dollar bin,... that will instead set you back at least a couple of hundred bucks on the rare occasions it does show up. Right now, for example, first pressings of Chrome's 1976 debut album The Visitation are selling for to $500 in mint condition. And while there have been a few reissues since then... no. Releasing on April 17, this is the one you've been waiting for. And if you can't wait until then, there's a startling new video for the album's "Return To Zanzibar" to tide you over.

The full story of The Visitation can be read in Chrome historian Neil Martinson's liner notes. Briefly, however, the band formed in mid-1970s San Francisco around a line-up of founder and mastermind, the late Damon Edge, John Cyborg, Mike Low and Gary Spain ... look, ma! No drums!!...; an arsenal that boasted electric violin, Moog, guitars, bass and drums and tape machines; and influences that included influences Can, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart and The Residents.

And together, they filled the hardest, darkest psychedelic punk heart with a sound that was even harder, even darker, than any of the more fashionable names and notions that history credits with reshaping rock's destiny. For Chrome didn't stop at reshaping it. They tore it apart and reinvented it, a wild and totally abandoned sequence of frantic noise that looked at around at everything else that was happening on the music scene in 1976, and blew it out of the water. Industrial music starts here, and Space Rock has never sounded more dangerous.

This 50th anniversary edition does not stop with the LP alone, however. The CD version also includes an entire bonus disc of two complete solo albums by Chrome founder and mastermind Damon Edge, 1986's Grand Visions and 1987's Surreal Rock - exquisitely sculpted slabs of sound that proved that, even alone, Edge's vision knew no boundaries.

More than one fan has compared Chrome's influence to the Velvet Underground - namely, not too many people heard them at the time, but everyone who did had their lives changed forever. Not to mention their notions of how music should sound.

CD/VINYL preorder here and see the tracklisting below:

DISC 1
1. How Many Years Too Soon?
2. Raider
3. Return to Zanzibar
4. Caroline
5. Riding You
6. Kinky Lover
7. Sun Control
8. My Time to Live
9. Memory Cords Over The Bay
10. Damon Edge 1981 interview [CD ONLY]

DISC 2 [CD ONLY]
1. That's Ok for Me
2. In the Light Fields
3. Anna
4. No Reason to Leave from the Sun
5. The Android Stroll
6. There's No Difference for You or Me
7. A Grand Vision
8. Coming Through for You
9. I'm Not a Loner
10. You Know My Heart Is True
11. I Found Us a Home
12. Surreal Real Soon
13. We Are Not Dying
14. The Sight to Sea