''Playback'' is the first studio album by the American

synthpop Synth-pop (short for synthesizer pop; also called techno-pop; ) is a subgenre of new wave music that first became prominent in the late 1970s and features the synthesizer as the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s a ...

band

SSQ SSQ may refer to: * La Sarre Airport, the IATA code for the Canadian airport * Shell Lake Municipal Airport, the FAA code for the United States airport * '' Social Science Quarterly'', a peer-reviewed social science journal * Society for Software ...

, released in 1983 by

Enigma Enigma may refer to: *Riddle, someone or something that is mysterious or puzzling Biology *ENIGMA, a class of gene in the LIM domain Computing and technology *Enigma (company), a New York-based data-technology startup * Enigma machine, a family o ...

and

EMI America Records EMI America Records was started in 1978 by EMI as a second United States, US label next to Capitol Records. It absorbed Liberty Records in 1984. In the late 1980s, EMI America was consolidated with Manhattan Records to form EMI Manhattan Records ...

.Paste Magazine
/ref> It was the only album released by the band as SSQ until the release of their second album ''Jet Town Je t'aime'' in 2020, though the band members later worked on lead singer

Stacey Q Stacey Lynn Swain (born November 30, 1958), known by her stage name Stacey Q, is an American pop singer, songwriter, dancer and actress. Her best-known single, John Mitchell's " Two of Hearts", released in 1986, reached number one in Canada, n ...

's debut album ''

Better Than Heaven ''Better Than Heaven'' is the debut studio album by American singer Stacey Q, released on October 17, 1986 by Atlantic Records. Produced by Jon St. James, ''Better Than Heaven'' is predominantly a dance-pop album with elements of Hi-NRG, free ...

'' (1986) and follow-up album, ''

Hard Machine ''Hard Machine'' is the second studio album by American singer Stacey Q, released in February 1988 by Atlantic Records. After the international success of her song " Two of Hearts" and debut album ''Better Than Heaven'' (1986), Swain began worki ...

'' (1988).

Music videos

Music videos were released for both "Synthicide" and "Screaming In My Pillow." There were three different videos released for "Screaming In My Pillow": The first version was a

PG-13 The Motion Picture Association film rating system is used in the United States and its territories to rate a motion picture's suitability for certain audiences based on its content. The system and the ratings applied to individual motion pictures ...

-rated version that received airplay on

MTV MTV (Originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a di ...

. A more controversial, "uncensored" version was aired on

Playboy TV Playboy TV (originally The Playboy Channel) is a pay television channel based in the United States. History The channel first launched on December 9, 1980, as Escapade by Rainbow Programing Services (a joint-venture of four cable companies, ...

depicting

full-frontal nudity Nudity is the state of being in which a human is without clothing. The loss of body hair was one of the physical characteristics that marked the biological evolution of modern humans from their hominin ancestors. Adaptations related to ...

and

lesbianism A lesbian is a homosexual woman.Zimmerman, p. 453. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate nouns with fema ...

by Stacey Swain and an unknown

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the Plan_(drawing), plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a mea ...

. A third video, called the

NC-17 The Motion Picture Association film rating system is used in the United States and its territories to rate a motion picture's suitability for certain audiences based on its content. The system and the ratings applied to individual motion picture ...

version, was considered too graphic for mainstream airplay. It was included on
Red Hot Rock
', a VHS compilation of uncensored music videos.

Track listing

Personnel

– vocals *

Jon St. James Jon St. James is an American guitarist, songwriter–composer, producer and recording engineer. His Casbah Recording Studio was a part of Orange County, California's new music scene in the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s. St. James' first albu ...

– guitars, synthesizer, vocals *

John Van Tongeren John Warrington Van Tongeren is an American keyboardist and composer for films and television. Biography Van Tongeren's career in the entertainment business began as a keyboardist, with one of his earliest projects being the band Q, featuring ...

– synthesizer * Rich West – synthesizer * Karl Moet – drum systems * Skip Hahn – keyboards, vocoder

Legacy

The album was re-released on July 10, 2014, by F1 Music as a digital download on the

iTunes Store The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,00 ...

and

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

. It has never been issued on a legitimate compact disc by any company. It was originally issued on vinyl and cassette only.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Playback (Ssq Album) 1983 debut albums Stacey Q albums Enigma Records albums EMI America Records albums New wave albums by American artists