"This record is just so unique. All I know is that it’s the kind of album where you could put any song from it on at a party and everybody starts dancing. I’d been hearing this song at parties for years and I never knew what it was, other than that I loved this particular sound. Finally, one night, I asked the DJ, and it turned out it was these sisters from The Bronx, doing something totally fresh in the late '70s and early '80s. It must have come very naturally to them, because it sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard. It’s almost bizarre; nearly all of it is just percussion and vocals and the occasional dub element. It’s minimal, and so singular, and you just have to dance to it. I guess that’s testament to how good the drummer was."

"No one’s been more encouraging of Screen Slate than Richard Hell, who saved its hide more than he realizes and promoted it with a missionary zeal. The first time we spoke we met at the late Café Orlin, the site of one of his most memorable scenes in the film, and then one of the last vestiges of the city that Smithereens portrays. I could have died. Smithereens was the first American indie to compete for the Palme d’Or, and it presages that whole wave we popularly associate with Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and so on. I know life isn’t a competition, but this is the best of those debuts. And when you consider Susan Seidelman alongside Allison Anders, Sara Driver, Penelope Spheeris, Lizzie Borden, Kathleen Collins, and Joel DeMott, among so many others, women really slayed in the American indie ’80s."