2026 is the year i'm finally coming to terms with the fact that egg punk has clearly peaked sometime over the last couple years and at this point, much of it feels kinda gentrified and overdone and i'm basically waiting for the next creative explosion in punk to emerge from some other unexpected niche. Just for the record, i'm not suddenly losing interest in, or even hating on the genre. This ain't another eggpunk sucks manifesto, haha. The beautifull mess we've retroactively come to assign the egg punk label to has been an endless well of joy and creativity that helped keep garage punk fresh and thrilling for the last decade-plus and the whole thing probably ain't going anywhere in the forseeable future. Also, if you're old enough to have seen a couple of subgenres rise and decline over the years, you know that no genre ever really dies anyway - eventually everything's always gonna re-emerge in some mutated form. The main thing that's changed for me in recent years is merely a sense of complete oversaturation and the fact that that certain strains of the genre appear to have very much consolidated themselves into a set of easily quantifiable, infinitely reproducible standard formulas - akin to some shallow instagram "aesthetic" - that has lost much of its novelty over time and if there's ever been a punk subgenre in danger of a hostile AI slop takover, that would probably happen to egg punk first with its increasingly generic-feeling library of tropes and set pieces. Anyway, all i'm saying is i'm rapidly losing patience and tolerance for the less inspired, middle-of-the-road strains of the genre and everyone's just gonna have to do a little more than just faithfully reproduce an established genre pattern to gain my attention going forward.
In that slowly declining landscape, a new Cherry Cheeks LP just came along and i'm actually positively struck by how admirably the group's sound has held up over the years (actually im gonna say that quite a lot of the genre's veterans' and forerunners' output still sounds pretty freakin' fresh to my ears to this day), though weirdly they're also exactly the kind of group whose past output is now in constant danger of retroactively fitting that aforementioned standard formula a bit too closely and thus being drowned out by the sheer forgettable mass of what i'd now call MOR eggpunk releases. The curse of being ahead of the curve i guess... What has always kept them afloat has been their excellent songwriting ability though and on this new LP, they not only fully lean into that strength, they even considerably up their game with an all-killer set of insanely catchy and addictive noise- and power pop tunes while also ever-so-slightly roughing things up on the production front with an overall just slightly more organic and propulsive drive that just about does its part to let their sound shine in 2026, even though it ain't exactly on the cutting edge of anything in this day and age. Let me put it like this: If you wanna ride the 12XU eggpunk coaster from now on, you need to be at least this tall. Also: In the end it's always about the songs, stupid. And these just fuckin' rip.
