The Velvet Underground & Nico Album • The Velvet Underground & Nico • 1967

The Velvet Underground & Nico is the debut album by American rock band the Velvet Underground and German singer Nico, released in March 1967 through Verve Records. It was recorded in 1966 while the band were featured on Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour. The album features experimental performance sensibilities and controversial lyrical topics, including drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism and sexual deviancy. It sold poorly and was mostly ignored by contemporary critics, but later became regarded as one of the most influential albums in the history of rock and pop music.

Described as "the original art-rock record", The Velvet Underground & Nico served as a major influence on many subgenres of rock music and forms of alternative music, including punk, garage, krautrock, post-punk, shoegaze, goth, and indie. In 1982, musician Brian Eno stated that while the album only sold approximately 30,000 copies in its first five years, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!" In 2003, it ranked 13th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and in 2006, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.

Nico sang lead vocals on three tracks, including the single "All Tomorrow's Parties". The Velvet Underground & Nico was recorded with the first professional line-up of the Velvet Underground: Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker. At the instigation of their mentor and manager Andy Warhol, and his collaborator Paul Morrissey, German singer Nico was also featured; she had occasionally performed lead vocals for the band. She sang lead on three of the album's tracks—"Femme Fatale", "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "I'll Be Your Mirror"—and back-up on "Sunday Morning". In 1966, as the album was being recorded, this was also the line-up for their live performances as a part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

The bulk of the songs that would become The Velvet Underground & Nico were recorded in mid-April 1966, during a four-day stint at Scepter Studios, a run-down recording studio in Manhattan. This recording session was financed by Warhol and Columbia Records' sales executive Norman Dolph, who also acted as an engineer with John Licata. Though the exact total cost of the project is unknown, estimates vary from $1,500 (US$12,528 in 2021 dollars) to $3,000 (US$25,055 in 2021 dollars).

Soon after recording, Dolph sent an acetate disc of the recordings to Columbia Records in an attempt to interest them in distributing the album, but they declined, as did Atlantic Records and Elektra Records—according to Morrison, Atlantic objected to the references to drugs in Reed's songs, while Elektra disliked Cale's viola. Finally, the MGM Records-owned Verve Records accepted the recordings, with the help of Verve staff producer Tom Wilson who had recently moved from a job at Columbia.

With the backing of a label, one month later in May 1966 three of the songs, "I'm Waiting for the Man", "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin", were re-recorded in two days at TTG Studios during a stay in Hollywood. When the record's release date was postponed, Wilson brought the band into Mayfair Recording Studios in Manhattan in November 1966, to add a final song to the track listing: the single "Sunday Morning".