Wow, i didn't expect this vancouver group's debut record to be such a perfect smasher. It should also turn out to be quite the crowdpleaser as far as contemporary post punk is concerned, turning back the clocks by a decade or two with its decidedly melodic approach, refined songwriting and tons of catchy hooks, combining the strengths of several strands of the genre. The most obvious comparison would be early 2010's bands like The Estranged, Criminal Code, Holograms, Autobahn or the more recent Girls In Synthesis… but i also pick up some echoes of the more straightforward punk side of things á la Xetas, Daylight Robbery or Anxious Living. And last but not least, groups bordering on noise pop territory in the vein of Piles, Wild Moth or Die! Die! Die! have sure left their mark here aswell.
My favorite british punk group of the moment has yet to write a song that isn't as infectious as fuck and their most recent digital (?) single release delivers another two of their strongest so far and once again will effortlessly conquer the hearts of every connoiseur of Television Personalities-influenced strumming á la Suburban Homes, Neutrals or Freak Genes.
Zoids keep things classy and weird on their newest tape, which will soon be physically available via Goodbye Boozy. Still clearly operating on the outer fringes of crude and dissonant garage-/post punk and highly demented space rock, this group or person of mysterious whereabouts remains a charmingly broken machine that doesn't need any fixing.
A wondrous and strange little EP full of otherworldly garage-/power-/fuzz pop from a Philadelphia Duo. The tape starts out as if the insane pop qualities of, say, Booji Boys or Daughter Bat & The Lip Stings collided with the smart rhythmic post punk of Lithics, while the remaining three songs then settle into a slightly more low-key kraut-leaning psychedelic groove, the likes of which you might suspect somewhere in the lo-fi pop worlds of acts like Germ House, Far Corners, Violent Change, Honey Radar or even early Woolen Men. Excellent shit throughout.
This Barcelona group plays a certain breed of post punk - the catchy and melodic kind that has been rarely heard in recent months - which i'd say is reminiscent of a rather diverse cluster of genre powerhouses such as Nightwatchers, Sievehead, Red Dons, Criminal Code and early The Estranged. Occasionally they overlap a bit into hardcore territory and in these moments, Acrylics come to mind.
This Philadelphia group's line-up brings together generations of punks, having Chuck Meehan of hardcore dinosaurs YDI among its ranks as well as members of more recent acts like Blank Spell, Haldol and DeStructos. Their first EP explodes right into your face with eight-and-a-half bursts of unpredictable, chaotic and noise-infused hard-/post-/weirdcore roughly in the ballpark of what you might've heard in recent years from bands like Kaleidoscope, Daydream or Fugitive Bubble.
Here's another fresh & tasty bite for the discerning connoisseur of quirky weird-ass garage punk. Friends of Set-Top Box, R.M.F.C., Eugh, T.L.B.M. and Metdog, among others, will approvingly bob their heads and extremities to this shit.
This L.A. group comes right out of the orbit of Launcher and Co-Ed. As you might already expect, this is another explosive charge of simple, raw and energetic noise made up to equal parts of garage- and catchy early 80s hardcore punk enhanced with that certain ragged KBD-style additive we've come to know and love out of this particular neighborhood.
Almost two years after an awesome demo tape, this dude from Cologne has finally unleashed upon us his full length debut and damn, is that another irresistible super-sized bucket of pure garage- and ***punk bliss roughly in the neighborhood of usual suspects like Set-Top Box, Metdog, Prison Affair, Erik Nervous or Dee Bee Rich, among many others.
An early contender for the loudest record of 2022, this burst of maximally abrasive noise - recorded sometime in 2016 and now finally released via Runstate Tapes - truly has what it takes to startle the dead and sounds like it crawled out of a disgusting brown puddle of pure despair, its hardcore punk foundation buried deep under thick layers of white noise and feedback… but listen closely and you might also find many unexpected flashes of melody embedded deep in there.
