In celebration of its 40th anniversary, R.E.M. has reissued their debut 1982 EP, Chronic Town. The set is now available for the first time ever as a standalone CD — as well as an exclusive LP picture disc, and cassette. The new package features extensive liner notes by producer Mitch Easter.

Chronic Town released on August 24, 1982 via I.R.S. Records, with the five-song set including such instant classics as “Gardening At Night,” “Wolves, Lower,” and “1,000,000.” The EP, which followed the band’s debut single, July 1981’s “Radio Free Europe,” was recorded in October 1981 at Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Drive-In Studio and sold 20,000 copies in its first year of release.

Chronic Town finally saw wide release when it was included on the CD edition of R.E.M.’s 1987 fan favorite rarities compilation, Dead Letter Office.

For all new Chronic Town merch, log on to: https://store.remhq.com/

Frontman Michael Stipe looked back on his and the band’s career and how college radio played a big part in their success: “When we were coming along, college radio was becoming kind of a very important force in American music, and people that were not interested in Top 40 or super-popular stuff, they had somewhere to go where you could hear new things and you could hear things that might be extremely local and not necessarily in your region of the country, but were exciting. And what that created was kind of a network of bands like ourselves and Sonic Youth and Black Flag who had for the first time a very fledgling core audience that when you went and performed in a club they would come and see you, they knew who you were, they knew the one or two singles that you had.”