Whenever Billiam does shit, it's Billiam week, all week. There's just no way evading the insane allure of one of current garage punk's brightest luminaries who's often getting tagged with the eggpunk label (including by me) and really, probably can't be evaluated in full isolation from that whole mess but also never quite fit into that template all that neatly and frictionless, more often than not feeling way more grounded in an earlier era of quirky garage- and synth punk that preceded our contemporary eggosphere, frequently more Ausmuteants than Prison Affair and chances are, when the genre bubble finaly deflates giving way to a barren eggpocalyptic hellscape, Billiam's just gonna emerge out of the rubble, shake the dust of his sleeves, light a cigarette Snake Plissken style and hum a new tune about the structural integrity of high-rise buildings into his bizarre nuclear-powered steampunk dictaphone on the way home. Anyway, it's Billiam week again and his new LP is a good one, who woud've thought? Engineered by Checkpoint's Erik Scerba (not the dude's only contribution you'll see posted here this week), this may well be the tightest and punchiest a Billiam recording has ever sounded, though thankfully the added fidelity doesn't try anything untoward to sand off his trademark rough edges and eccentric flourishes in these twelve new tunes that once again show off the guy's unfailing, inventive song-crafting abilities, all the while sounding unmistakably like himself yet also never failing to come up with some neat surprise just around the next corner. As a DIY genre auteur he's kinda the equivalent to that certain kind of well-regarded genre director you know is gonna make a certain kind of movie but you also have a well-founded trust in their skills and creative vision to know they'll still surprise and thrill you in unexpected ways every time.
To be quite honest, the discography so far of this french-german group who've been goin' for over a decade by now has been a bit of an unfocused mess at times with more recent releases often missing the determination and never quite reaching the heights of their 2019 War On Words Vol. 1&2 tapes so i didn't expect a whole lot going into this. I'm all the more pleasantly surprised now 'cos on this new one, Warm Swords sound like they mean fucking business more so than ever before, keeping their eccentric ideas and eclectic influences but shaping them into way more tangible, compact and structurally sound little units that are a lot easier to make sense of. The opening salvos of Mirror and Parasite are solid examples of borderline egg-ish art-, synth- and garage punk already but it's with the hypnotic spaced-out post punk of the third tune Friction when the real meat of the album kicks in and just won't ever drop the ball for the rest of the LP, all the while entering different territory with each following tune like the new wave-ish power pop vibes of Save Your Mother, the oldschool Useless Eaters-isms of C-Side, the laid back folk-ish jangle excess of Shortcut Through The Mountain, some lost-in-space claustrophobia in The Anarchist Threat ... the delights and surprises never cease on this overflowing bag of treats . At this level, i'm truly stoked for the next ten years of Warm Swords.
Ever wondered what happened to the dungeon punk genre? In the early '20s it felt like that shit was gonna take the punk scene by storm but today there's no denying that there hasn't been a major genre landmark since last year's Steröid LP... there've been some attempts of course like that Powerplant record which sadly devolved into a tedious mess of half-baked prog fuckery and let's not even speak of the disappointment that was Poison Ruïn's recent too-slick-for-it's-own-good venture into radio rock territory. But anyway, here's a more than worthy genre entry for a change, coming from a group i didn't truly expect to go down that route, even though their more recent artwork subtly hinted in that direction at the very least.
Let's also address another elephant in the room that i just can't stay quiet about and that is the quickly proliferating practice of effectively asking vinyl prices for digital downloads on bandcamp, with a completely ridiculous one-dollar-per-minute rate quickly becoming the norm from certain bands and lables. Cut it out dudes, that's a fucking dick move.
With that out of the way, these swiss dudes have crafted a quite excellent second album that on one hand doesn't add any new elements to the genre toolkit but then again maintains a level of quality and cheesy fun that i was missing from the genre in the previous twelve-plus months. For them, it feals like a natural, organic progression keeping all the catchy qualities of their previous work while seamlessly merging that distinctive layer of ancient heavy metal into their tunes. Not afraid to get a bit corny at times (yet also never too much so), this record delivers a neverending surge of often quite obvious low-hanging-fruit kinds of hooks. I have no complaints here though 'cos that shit just fucking works. S.G.A.T.V. play their shit straight but their steady aim always perfectly hits your primal instincts every single time. The expected age of dungeon punk supremacy is still postponed until further notice but as long as records like this come along every now and then, maybe the genre can at least continue its work by slowly undermining and nibbling away at the dark empire's foundations from the inside.
Guess what, it's another eggpunk record and it's one i can totally get behind and boy, have these Cleveland, Ohio folks gained steam and tightened up their performance since the still a bit too loose sounding Digital Distortion EP. And it's more than that though. While that record still kinda struggled differentiating them from the flood of Snooper acolytes, they're really growing into their own here by just embracing the weirdness and frantic energy like, i mean... fuck, Can't Stop may be the first song called Can't Stop in a long while that actully sounds like they can't stop, at least until it does stop quite early and suddenly. Truth in advetising rules supreme here with (I Just Wanna) Be a Ramone being kind of a Ramones tune, Salsa being some twisted kind of salsa-ish thing, Uptight sounding like the most uptight thing on the record indeed. It's just tons of exciting fun all the way through and they save the best thing for last in the form of the epic seven-minute closing tune The Nuclear Option, which seems to draw heavy inspiration from early Uranium Club and Australia's perpetually underappreciated garage punk underdog overlords Electric Prawns 2 rather than from the most ubiquitous suspects of contemporary eggpunk. Good call!
In the current, heavily consolidated and codified eggpunk era, the third EP of NYC's Raybees doesn't exactly break the genre mold on a surface level, but stil sticks out by at least bending the rules a decent bit, elevating what at first glance could have been yet another average artifact of the Prison Affair school with a more cluttered production aethetic and what sounds to me like some truly fun pots-pans-and-washbasket style bedroom drumming laid atop the otherwise kinda standard vintage electric beats. There's a genuine sense of joy and a creative spark emanating from these songs which the genre is often lacking for me more recently and it certainly helps that there are some heavy-duty songwriting chops on display here too, especially in the increasingly synth-dominated second half with tunes like Knife Fight and the closer Victory March having more than just a little of an oldschool Digital Leather feel to them.
The newest EP by Sprgrs from Granada, Spain is yet another egg-ish artifact that appears to adhere a bit too closely to a standard genre formula in its early stretch and wouldn't have been much to write home about if it weren't so dramatically upping its game with every successive tune, continuously moving away from a tired Prison Affair-informed template towards one leaning heavier on the increasing quality of its song material whose strengths really start to kick in from the third song onwards although admittedly, they kinda regress back to their old ways in the closing tune Trabaja. But hey, it's the year 2026 where we just don't have many good things anymore, let alone in eggpunk specifically, so i'm not gonna complain about an EP with three such certified bangers on it and i'll call that kind of thing a keeper in this new era of tempered expectations.
Roo Stafford of Leicester, England has already been fucking around for a couple years on a number of really neat EPs but the dude truly hits the nail on the head with this newest one, a no-filler kickass batch of unpretentious garage punk impact craters that feel more at home roughly around 2014-2020 than right now and perfectly fuse the uncontrollable chaos and wild creative drive of the early (proto-)egg generation á la Erik Nervous, Skull Cult, Neo Neos, Hobocop, Coneheads with the tight-ass performance of already more established garage punk acts of those years like Sauna Youth, Ex-Cult or early Useless Eaters into a dense explosive charge that once again feels like a breath of fresh air in our current, often overly sanitized (watered-down even?) era for that whole genre cluster.
It hasn't been a massive music week otherwise but at least it's been a decent one for groups whose name ends in -ro which make up a whopping 50% of this week's blog output. Apéro from Hamburg, Germany already left a thoroughly convincing impression with their debut EP Cold Drinks, Cool Snacks last year and their newest EP continues in the same vein of moderately egg-ish, catchy-ass garage- and synth punk, the first two tunes being perfectly cromulent if maybe a bit routine examples in their own right, though it's the second half where this record really comes alive with a barrage of timeless power pop hooks that among other things kinda channel some older Sheer Mag energy.
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.
Dammo does that Domo demo kablammo. This presumably Winnipeg based group excites my synapses in a way that surely does feel kinda egg-related in this day and age but also stands apart thanks to more of an oldschool vibe that harkens back to the more innocent pre- and proto-egg days of the 2010s and the hook-laden no-frills garage punk explosions by the likes of Kid Chrome, S.B.F. and, a little later, Set-Top Box, Crown Moulding, Liquid Face or the earliest works of Science Man.
