Black Is the Night: The Definitive Anthology is a 2-CD, career-spanning compilation album by the British punk rock band the Damned,[4] released on 1 November 2019.[3][5] It collects tracks from most of the band's studio albums between 1977 and 2018, as well as selected non-album singles and B-sides. It also includes the new track "Black Is the Night". Of the band's eleven studio albums to date, Not of This Earth (1995) and So, Who's Paranoid? (2008) are not represented on the anthology.[6] All tracks were chosen by the band themselves,[7][8] and sequenced thematically instead of chronologically.[3]
AllMusic felt that "the track listing does make sense of the often elusive through line of the Damned's history, as Dave Vanian's showman's vocals, Captain Sensible's clever melodies, and their smarter-than-you-think wit unites the music as they travel from punk to garage rock to hard rock to pop to goth to a few pit stops in between." AllMusic noted that the inclusion of some of the band's more recent material "shows they're still in touch with their various muses, and for all their sonic shape-shifting, this is a far more consistent listening experience than one would expect."[3]
With no tracks represented from Not Of This Earth and So, Who's Paranoid?, the Big Takeover wrote that the anthology was "not fully representative" and "omissions from these albums is questionable."[7]