"The Birthday Party" is a 1980 album by the Australian rock band the Boys Next Door, who were transitioning to the name The Birthday Party at the time. The album was produced by the band, Tony Cohen, and Keith Glass, and it was recorded at Richmond Recorders Studios in Melbourne between July 1979 and February 1980.
Musically, The Birthday Party marked a shift from the new-wave pop-punk style of their previous album Door, Door (1979) to a darker, more chaotic post-punk sound. This transition represented both the final release under the Boys Next Door name and the band's first full-length release as The Birthday Party. The album was later reissued under The Birthday Party name, reflecting the band's new identity.
The entire album was reissued on CD as part of the Hee Haw compilation, alongside the Hee Haw EP, which contained two of the album's tracks, "The Red Clock" and "The Hair Shirt," originally featured on the EP in 1979.
During the recording, Tracy Pew, the band's bassist, was absent for the session of "Mr. Clarinet," so his bass parts were added later. Engineer Tony Cohen recalled that the recording studio, Richmond Recorders, was designed to be "non-reverberant" and acoustically "dead," which pushed the band to experiment with unconventional techniques to create interesting sounds. For example, on "The Hair Shirt," Nick Cave sang through a telephone to achieve a screechy vocal effect, and to meet Rowland S. Howard's request for more treble on his guitar, Cohen used sheets of corrugated iron to create a tunnel around his amp.
