Okay so here we have yet another Alien Nosejob record showcasing Jake Robertson and accomplices in full-blown hardcore mode, superficially similar to what we've heard a couple times previously, most notably on their two hardcore 7"s via Iron Lung Records, though this wouldn't be a true Alien Nosejob LP if it didn't come up with plenty of neat surprises and bright ideas along the way. Also, by no means is this a straight rehash of said 7"s which veered closer to a harsher '80s-informed style more appropriate and in line with the influences that permeate through much of the Iron Lung Records catalogue. Here, the overall vibe is much closer to earlier incarnations of the west coast punk scenes with the usual suspects such as Germs, Circle Jerks and Adolescents looming large and as much as Alien Nosejob were never shy of catchy melodic hooks even on these, their most uncompromising records to date, they really come to the forefront on this one and it would always be unfair to shrug off any AJ record as a just a curious oddball genre excercise as i've always felt that even at the rawer end of their pretty eclectic musical spectrum, the group pours in just as much effort of plainly superior craftsmanship and songwriting prowess as with any other release of theirs. These records ain't mere curios but central pillars of their incredible discography, carrying the unmistakable handwriting of these modern-day garage punk auteurs.
Smirk always kinda stood apart from the pack of 2nd wave eggpunk groups in as much as there always appeared to have been some tension going on between the more upbeat and quirky egg-ish vibes and a much darker post punk undercurrent in many of their early tunes, a trait they went all-in on for the first time only on last year's incredible Domestic Dog 7", just in time when their previous trajectory, as well as that of much of their eggpunk surroundings in general, started to show serious signs of diminishing returns. Its two tunes put them more in the neighborhood of essential post punk pillars of the Institute, Marbled Eye and The Estranged variety and the shit worked just admirably 'cos these impressively elaborate and balanced tunes absolutely held their own and so does everything on this new LP now, their most sober and earnest set of tunes to date, showing all the hallmarks of another eggpunk outfit hatching into a full-blown chickenpunk group in a way that i'm sure would make ex Lumpy dude quite proud, even if i still think he's got the whole chicken-and-egg problem upside down. In all these cases, clearly the egg was there first and these eggs need to have room to exist and be bred and flourish in order to mature into the kind of beauty we see right here. Damn does that sentence make me sound stupid and pretentious. I better refrain from typing any more random words now.
Finally here's the debut LP of this group from Bremen, Germany, a record i've been hotly anticipating even though i've also had some reasonable doubts as to how well that whole schtick is gonna play in 2026 given how insanely, in the short span of 18 months since their debut EP, the proliferation and oversaturation of vaguely Snooper and Prison Affair-informed egg-ish garage punk groups has progressed to the point of some unavoidable genre fatigue on my part, as i've been moaning about previously already. On one hand i'm kinda sad to say that, for me at least, the enjoyment of a new Wax Minds LP is indeed somewhat affected and it's actually through little fault of their own so i'm kinda feeling like an asshole for even saying that. My initial impression ain't helped by the fact that the record ain't exactly front-loaded with its strongest material - especially the second and third tunes Lead-Limbed Losers' Anthem and Growing Old, Staying Gold somehow just don't quite cut it for me - and it's only starting with the title tune Funatic Asylum that the album begins to really come into its own and finally settle into that golden zone of catchy-ass hooks, exciting slicing-and-dicing guitar work and vicious like-clockwork garage punk propulsion we've all been hoping for. Did i also mention this group absolutely kills live? Go see 'em if you have the chance! Many of my gripes may be purely a me-problem actually, borne out of following the eggosphere a bit too closely for a long time, and as much as this record has to stand up to a glut of vaguely similar sounding groups these days, i actually think it does an admirable job at that once it gets over its somewhat shaky opening stretch.
A mysterious group from nowhere is ambushing us with this killer EP wallowing in a garage punk sub-niche not all too common anymore these days, which i'd say is actually ripe for a comeback, strongly reminding me of the mid-aughts-to-2010s era of angular garage punk that was kinda the backdrop that informed this very blog's early days. Think of groups á la Sauna Youth, Ex-Cult, Shark Toys and early Teenanger... maybe there are also some traces of UV Race, Total Control or Eddy Current Suppression Ring in there, even a touch of early Useless Eaters in the record's absolute über-tune I Find Your Tattoos & Piercings Boring. So yeah, good shit right there, wouldn't say no to more of that!
This Springfield, Illinois group has conjured up an insanely tasty and addictive debut EP here that, despite a tiny bit of a Rudimentary Peni-esque death rock-ish vibe early on in the opening tune The Stain, quickly settles into an oldschool niche located somewhere on the melodic fringes of the mid-to-late eighties punk landscape including a good bit bit of pre-'90s pop punk goodness á la Fastbacks, still unaffected by the genre's later disposable sameness but rather grounded in refined, classic pop songcraft. Another valid comparison to describe this shit would be the recent EPs of Montreal group Psychic Armour, minus their heavy metal influences.
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.
Last Year's Epoxy River and Super Pool LP by this Evesham, New Jersey (presumably one-man-) group was already such a massive leap in quality for them and yet again, they manage to considerably refine their sound on this newest LP, on which they kinda leave behind the late-2000s fuzz punk and noise pop ingredients that dominated that record and lean even more into the oldschool '80s and '90s college- and indie rock-informed sounds ranging from classic Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh, Bitch Magnet and early Seam to the likes of Superchunk and Polvo, with just a subtle hint of first and second wave emo thrown in for good measure but also increasing amounts of '80s hardcore-based proto-noise rockers like Flipper, Big Black, Drunks With Guns and No Trend, especially in the final stretch of the record. There's an unpredictable quality and an explosive, uncontainable energy to these tunes, radiating the pure untamed joy of blasting a euphoric and abrasive, larger-than-life and kinda anachronistic type of melodic noise out of your gear that feels pleasantly out-of-place in this era, all of it further thrown deliciously off-balance by the ear-piercing screams that prove this dude still ain't ready to half-ass anything here.
Damn, has it really been close to five years since we last heard from these spanish egg-/garage punk veterans? Anyway, this new EP shows the group in top form once again, the opening tune Almas Perdidas transporting a kind of intricacy and elegance you'd rather expect from, say, late-career Fugazi than anything coming out of the current eggpunk circuit, easily transcending the band's humble beginnings, though they ain't doing anything to betray or obscure their roots either, the thrilling polyrhythmic playfulness of Pues pues pues pues being yet another impressive example of fusing fun, egg-ish quirks and whims with a healthy dose of subtle postcore smarts before Yo Yo leads the EP to an insanely satisfying conclusion with another energetic, comparatively straightforward but by no means simplistic punk smasher. This may easily be the most well-balanced and elaborate thing Finale have done so far.
Holy fuck, what this Wakefield, UK group is pulling off on their debut EP is pushing so many of the right buttons for me. Rooted in timeless buzzsaw-guitar post punk with more than just a bit of a Big Black edge, this shit also incorporates much of a catchy garage punk immediacy, noise rock sonic assault and relentless hardcore propulsion with plenty of melodic scraps and fragments peppered all throughout. This is so fucking up my alley and reminds me of another crop of UK post punk acts that either predate or avoid the more gentrified nature of the current UK landscape, the closest comparisons i can come up with from the top of my head would be Leeds-based groups Cool Jerks and Coded Marking, but that doesn't tell the whole story either.
This group's debut EP is Indiana DIY punk at its best that on one hand appears to have quite a few things in common at least spiritually with the state's early eggpunk scene as it certainly has a similar air of chaos, inventiveness and unpredictability you'd expect of a Skull Cult or Erik Nervous record for example, even though the rough sonic parameters here are often of a completely different nature, ranging from propulsive straight-ahead garage punk and a no-bullshit hardcore energy reminiscent of another indiana curiosity - that whole Zhoop/Feed/Djinn/Brundle/etc. clusterfuck - to plenty of geographically rather unrelated postcore vibes of the Wymyns Prysyn or oldschool Hot Snakes-/Drive Like Jehu variety, various stages and incarnations of NYC's Science Man or the fuzz punk excess of early The Gobs. Anyway, as you may have gathered, there's always some thrilling and unexpected shit happening on this record.
