After two awesome EPs in 2024, Austin's Temporary Curse return with a third one that at first glance strikes me as maybe a bit too 2024-sounding still, given the accelerated proliferation and codification of eggpunk tropes and aesthetics, genre oversaturation, yadda yadda... i've talked about that shit before. As such, this thing actually starts out sounding a little bloodless and uninspired to me, only really kicking into gear with its third track Monochrome when the distinct catchy and psychedelic qualities of the predecessors start to break through in an explosion of rousing hooks, followed by the flawless fuzzed-out midtempo gem of a song that is Insect and a perfectly functional no-frills garage punk smasher named Speedracer. The instrumental closing tune then doesn't hurt but ain't nothing to write home about either. So there you have it, three hits, three misses on this one and there i've just done it, i wrote the first explicitly middling review of a record for this blog and i'm totally not used to doing that and feel a bit like an asshole for that. Not that i ever considered my blurbs "reviews" in the first place anyway rather than badly written though wholehearted endorsements, but i guess i'll have to call them reviews now? Still better than dubbing all of it content, i guess.
Anyway, if you've been wonderin' why i've grown to be so uncharactaristically critical of new releases recently then that's 'cos 2026 so far has been the most dogshit disappointing, creatively stagnant year for music i can remember since i started doing this blog and oftentimes i'm really struggling to find much to truly get excited about these days (certainly one of multiple factors responsible for the decreasing frequency and number of posts here) - quite fitting for a year in which most things outside of music also unconditionally suck more than ever and i only expect things to get much worse going forward. Whatever man, here's hopin' 2026 can at least somewhat redeem itself with an onslaught of top-notch releases in the fall, otherwise i'm slowly gonna have to start wondering what the fuck i'm actually doing here and why i should keep subjecting myself to the tolls it takes to keep doing a thing that has never really felt that sustainable in the long term anyway. Like, starting a music blog in 2013, just around the time when the older music blogs already started dropping like flies with everyone else determined to leave the open web for good and disappear in that unholy social media black hole? Fucking ridiculous proposition if you ask me and 2026 feels like could finally become the breaking point for me in the face of other personal, mental health-related and economic realities. Anyway, for the time being, someone please do something to distract me from that nagging end-of-an-era vibe i'm getting.
When the Carp released their first demo 2021 it was love at first sight but still the group felt a bit like a fifth wheel as far as Nathan Ward-Fronted bands are concerned, kinda like a slightly too logical middle ground between the jaggy post punk efficiency of Knowso, the wild off-the-rails energy of Cruelster and the rougher garage edge of Perverts Again. Their excellent debut LP in 2024 then saw them branch out a little, though still sounding kinda noncommittal to any clear direction that would differentiate them from the established Cruelster and Knowso blueprints. Now this new one for the first time sounds to me like the group is slowly starting to develop an identity of their own marked by a more rustic, wilfully dumbed-down garage punk undercurrent and a way less brainy and detached, more earnest and unfiltered heart-on-your-sleeve approach to their tunes. Anyway, as pretty much anything these dudes have touched so far, this yet another essential nugget for admirers of their particular strain of highly structured and sturdy post punk cubism with a fuzzy garage edge.
This Victoria, British Columbia group is generating tons of fun and eccentric post-/art punk bliss that partly, but not quite, fits the common mold of late '70s / early '80s Siouxsie, Pylon, Delta 5 or B-52s inspired groups… there's a similar catchy quirkines to these but you also can't deny a strong garage-y proto punk thing goin' here and a rougher, more anarchic UK-bred DIY vibe, the kind you'd rather expect from the likes of Cravats, Membranes, Fatal Microbes or Flowers In The Dustbin or hidden away in the depths of some old Messthetics compilation, while there's still some plausible connection you can draw to more recent post punk phenomena of the Spread Joy and Marcel Wave variety and even some 2010s weirdcore phenomena loke Warm Bodies and Vexx. That's some appealing shit right there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 world of rapidly changing musical hypes and trends and an unrelenting social media promo rat race trying to please an algorithm way more than actual humans, i always get some healing out of watching a band as uncompromising and unfazed by the modern attention economy as these frenchmen, who even predate this blog by over a decade, simply doing whatever the fuck they like for close to a quarter century by now. Accordingly, their seventh LP once again shares all the qualities and quirks you've come to love about them over time and nonetheless they stay utterly unpredictable here in their art punk that stays every bit as crude as it's catchy and nonetheless has plenty of variety and smarts buried under its rough surface too, their possible inspirations spanning from old-timey noise makers á la Half Japanese, The Membranes, Feedtime, The Fall, various old no wave-related or even slightly kraut-ish indulgences to slightly more recent garage punk essentials like the early works of The UV Race and Eddy Current Suppression Ring. But really, it would be unfair at this point to treat Subtle Turnhips as anything less than the unique and uncompromising creative force in their own right they've proven to be and this new record too is no less than yet another instant genre classic.
