Kinks’ Early Albums Collected in New Vinyl Mono Box

The Kinks'' first eight albums will be released in a new vinyl mono box, along with The Kinks, a bonus double-disc compilation also known as "The Black Album." A highlight of this upcoming set, simply titled The Mono Collection, is the previously out-of-print U.S. mono mix of Live at Kelvin Hall.

The Mono Collection, due Dec. 16, will arrive on 180-gram vinyl with a 48-page hardcover booklet featuring never-before-seen photos and new interviews with Ray Davies, Dave Davies and Mick Avory. The set seeks to present some of the Kinks' best-known music in the way that the group originally intended.

“I wanted the tracks to sound how we would play them live,” Ray Davies says in a press release. “I wrote lots of songs for a particular sound and production.”

The Mono Collection is available for pre-order now. As with the Kinks' earlier 10-CD mono collection, featured albums in the upcoming set includes early classics like 1964's Kinks, 1965's Kinda Kinks and The Kink Kontroversy, 1966's Face to Face and 1967's Something Else by the Kinks, as well as more ambitious, thematic projects like 1968's The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and 1969's Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

Those albums produced a string of favorites like “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of The Night,” “I Need You,” “Sunny Afternoon,” “Waterloo Sunset,” “Autumn Almanac,” “Days,” “Victoria” and “Shangri-La.”

Joining a growing trend toward mono, the Kinks' box arrives just after a similar collection of early recordings by the Rolling Stones earlier this year. The Beatles issued a mono vinyl box in 2014.

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