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.
The restless Leipzig scene is at it again with this neat new tape of moderately egg-ish garage punk goodness that fits neatly inside established genre parameters but excells nonetheless by the sheer strength and consistency of its underlying song material as well as a sleazy hard-rockin’ edge and a healthy propulsion that reminds me of older shit roughly in the vein of early Kid Chrome or S.B.F.. This shit ain’t trying anything new but it strikes all the right nerves with me and the thing is just packed with hits, plain and simple.
Wow, a new Eye Ball EP running over four minutes… that feels totally epic after their previous Of The Northern Americas EP spat three songs at us in just under a minute. Anyway, these four tunes have all the unpredictable, chaotic brilliance you’ve come to love about this group, combining an unwavering knack for catchy, melodic tunes with a fuzzed-out lo-fi sound that just seems tailor-made for their brief fuzz pop song explosions.
A steady trickle of new tunes on their bandcamp page already suggested that something new was coming our way from this indispensable pillar of the 2010s garage punk scene, yet it still feels very much out of the blue the way this new LP, their first after roughly a decade, got unceremoniously dropped on bandcamp digitally without warning, a vinyl release via Total Punk to follow sometime later. Also there’s the question hanging over this, after their triumphant return as a touring act last year, as to how much Useless Eaters are actually functioning as a band on this record as there’s this heavily electronic, homegrown quality to these recordings, making heavy use of classic dub production techniques, synths and sampled drums and an otherwise quite guitar-centric sound that kinda suggests this is Seth Sutton fucking around in the studio solo. Not that it matters much. This is a fascinating record presenting an otherworldly mirror version of Useless Eaters, quite familiar in many aspects but also a bit of a reimagining of their sound, very much unlike anything they’ve done before in its abstract, cold abrasiveness, a distinct industrial feel to these tunes that exceeds even the most out-there moments of in their previous discography.
Just as unexpected came the release a couple days earier by G2K, a group which i think is a collaboration between Sutton and Sal Go of Washington group Sexfaces. Anyway, these four tunes act as a neat companion piece to the Useless Eaters record, sharing quite a bit of its production aesthetics but otherwise dabbling in a way more raw and primitive oldschool garage-, art- and proto punk-influenced sound enveloped in that familiar layer of spaced-out haze.
In a week marked by unexpected bandcamp drops, here’s another one of those coming our way via the bandcamp page of Austin, Texas group Chronophage. As far as i can tell Providers appear to be a NYC-based group and the sonic parameters of their spanish language tunes are a curious mixture of quite pronounced Oi!-influences on one hand but have just as much of a mid-eighties punk and indie-/college rock quality that calls to mind groups as diverse as classic Hüsker Dü, late Naked Raygun, Dinosaur Jr., Angst and Replacements, their melodies and arrangements charged with a sense of melancholy that feels as typical of that era as it’s also reminiscent of that brief moment in the early 2010s when a number of acts like Milk Music, Happy Diving and California X led to a short-lived resurgence of that particular sound, while at other moments you can find some echoes of the melodic fuzz punk and noise pop of that same era and groups like Male Bonding, Joanna Gruesome, No Age or Wavves.
A neat new EP by this Harrisburg, Pennsylvania dude who has already amassed a good amount of clutter on his bandcamp, though honestly nothing he’s done before has quite the spark of his newest EP which excells in four flawless examples of timeless no-frills (garage) punk songwriting. Self-described as first wave punk revival, i’ll beg to differ and say that, despite a very slight ’77 undercurrent here, these tunes reek way more of the 2000s and ’10s garage punk eras, clearly echoing the likes of, say, solo Jay Reatard, Dark Thoughts and most of all, early Liquids among many others.
