Eddy Current Suppression Ring My World Booji Boys Lilah F.U. Drakulas Singin’ With My Tongue Cut Out Party Dozen Special Unit Sick Pack Nightmare Xray Xeroxx Leave Me Alone Jay Veil I wanna kill you Eye Ball Ben (Again) Fleon Sunoco OCD Gremlin (My Throat)
Patrimoine Poulet Fratelli (De Quando Si Fai) The Broom DIY P.I. Attention Deficit Due Process Fixations Frankenstein’s Girlfriend Last Touch Innocence Nobody Rules 3 Zero Rat Where The Fuck Did You Go No Stayer Sins of the Flock G.U.N. Death Dealer
Tracklist
H8 Mile Cologne Wax Head Terminal Sinker G2K I Rock I Ran Rare Spam To´ve Been Green Marbled Eye The Guest Les Feüilles Mörtes Las Ruinas de Bizancio
Retired Boxer No Hope The Burrow Bitter Wind pt. 2 Brash Habits Vampire Sex Mex Ride or Die Problem Dance With My Boots On Prisonnier Du Temps Dernier Regard
In a, so far, kinda lackluster music year as 2026, the surprise release of a new Eddy Current record is certainly a “drop everything you’re doing right now” kind of event as there are actually precious few groups still around as foundational to the current garage punk scene, a relic from a different era that has held up so great it feels as if they’ve always been a constant presence in the time i’ve been doing this blog, even though in reality all their classic-era releases actually predate 12XU by a couple years and ‘cos of that, the first time our timelines actually overlapped with theirs hasn’t been until 2019, when their All In Good Time LP showcased a more relaxed, melancholy and thoughtful incarnation of their sound that at the time appears to have disappointed some early fans, but which i was actually very much on board with, even if this certainly wasn’t among the strongest sets of tunes they’d done thus far. It was a new direction forward though, the highlights were undeniable and it was actually the quieter tunes like Our Quiet Whisper and Human Race that hit the hardest and showed a more mature path ahead the group would continue to follow with their overall stronger, more fleshed-out 2025 Shapes and Forms EP. The group never before sounded quite as stripped-down and effortless as they do on this new record, more than ever excelling in the art of achieving more by doing less in a fashion that only a band this seasoned can pull off really, churning out a flawless stream of equally catchy and classy jams that tend to sound kinda basic and traditional at first glance yet reliably transcend their simple ingredients owing to a plainly superior type of songcraft they’ve honed and refined over two decades, all fully exposed and enhanced by their trademark workmanlike, no-bullshit band performance. No shit, this is not only their greatest LP in over a decade (not that there were that many to choose from in that time anyway, haha…), its also the definitive statement and perfect encapsulation of what this present-day era of Eddy Current Suppression Ring is all about, the logical conslusion and brilliant payoff that All In Good Time has already been hinting at but couldn’t fully capture yet.
Some dude from Bloomington, Indiana has created an insanely appealing debut mini-LP here, standing with one leg in egg-ish garage- and the other in DIY art punk territory, with the egg-ishness getting increasingly toned down over the course of the record which really helps these tunes evade the looming eggpunk fatigue that even someone as historically sympathetic towards the genre as me often struggles to overcome in recent times. Well, this record does avoid most of the genre’s clichés, common piffalls and shortcomings and indeed its much rawer sound compared to many contempory acts rather reminds me of the earlier 2010s formative era of the genre and specifically the Bloomington connection would suggest the likes of Skull Cult as a primary inspiration. Anyway, add to that a number of killer tunes á la 5:43 p.m., Giving Up and OCD and you get a debut that manages to punch leagues above its weight and really stands on its own in an overcrowded genre landscape.
This Maumee, Ohio group has some synth-enhanced power pop-ish garage punk goodness for us on their debut LP whose catchy-as-fuck pop nuggets are constantly steeped in a hazy, uncanny atmosphere and covering a quite decent spectrum ranging all the way from old Lost Sounds, solo Reatard or Digital Leather over the song explosions of early Vagues or King Tuff towards quite recent stuff like Monda, Booji Boys or that incredible Emmett O’Connor LP from last year. A barrage of undeniable earworms whose prevalent sense of melancholy more often than not is met with tons of a quite uplifting, euphoric energy.
Another quality dispatch of the Berlin post punk scene from what i suspect is probably some well-established figure in that space but as secretive as these circles tend to be, we’re possibly not gonna learn who’s actually behind this perversely dark and minimalist artifact (i could think of some usual suspects though…) radiating a muffled, subdued quality that leaves you gasping for air with the closest comparisons i can come up with being some older DBR / Dee Bee Rich releases or maybe an ultra-sedated version of the likes of Exit Group, Red Gaze, Imposition Man, Pigeon or latter day Diät.
Allow me to be blunt here, the opening track on this new EP, while not terrible by any means, ain’t among the brightest things the Oakland group has done so far and strikes me as just a bit below their own standards, carrying some of the unfortunate tells of kinda average, lazy post punk song construction based on a random succession of bog-standard riffs and genre tropes and to make matters worse, the most unimaginative use of polyrhythm appregios in the finale just really rubs me the wrong way in a song whose cluttered parts just won’t quite add up in the first place. Thankfully, everything else on their new EP feels a lot more well thought-out and inspired with the remaining five tunes showing all the elegance and intricacy in songwriting and arrangements we’ve come to appreciate from these veterans in the contemporary post punk field, whose 2024 LP Read The Air still saw them considerably upping their game almost a decade into their work. This new one now seems to strike a bit of a middle ground between that record’s careful balance and the immediacy of their earier work and i’m all here for it… i just wish that first tune wasn’t so clumsy and utterly skippable.
