On their 5th longplayer, a good ten years into their tenure, the San Francisco group comes across as the most focused they've sounded in a long while with much of the fat trimmed off their tunes in their unmistakable amalgamation of catchy-ass eighties college- and nineties indie rock with added elements of jangle pop and shoegaze-y moments that remind me of Swervedriver more than any of the usual genre suspects; pitchfork-era millenial whimsy being coupled with an unexpected sense of earnesty that feels more at home in the golden late-'80s/early-'90s indie rock era. What sounds more like yet another oldschool indie flashback on paper, this group has absolutely made this shit their own over the years. I won't ever forgive them for the title track though, the only true miss on this record as we're well beyond the age where i could tolerate any amount of obvious on-the-nose auto tune, no matter how tongue-in-cheek you go about it 'cos that kind of joke had already gone stale like twenty years ago. Don't do that anymore please. Just don't, 'cos i just can't.
Different flavors and intensities of cowpunk-related noise seem to be a running thread in the past two weeks and right on cue, there's also a new record by one of recent years' most impressive voices in the field: Reuben Sawyer's solo project Anytime Cowboy, as usual released without much fuss or even the slightest heads-up in terms of promotion and i like that - Anytime Cowboy certainly ain't a group in danger of getting dubbed an industry plant by kids just coming to terms with the fact that such a thing as the music PR business even exists, haha. Anyway, with how massive an instant classic last year's Demons Obey has been, it would surely be kind of a tall order to expect another of those right away and indeed, its successor doesn't even feel too concerned with one-upping that record and instead comes across as just another very, very good record that may feel a couple tracks too long at one point or another but on the plus side, shuffles things around with a slightly altered, lighter overall feel, leaning a bit heavier into a relaxed and upbeat indie rock vibe while still carrying that unmistakable folk-ish strummy, jangly feel and the uncanny, surreal quality to these tunes. At eighteen of those, the record predictably has a bit of a looser and more fragmented character, though if you judge it by the sheer number of certified bangers on there, i'm gonna say it's nothing short of another fucking winner.
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.
On their second LP, this New Jersey group dabbles in a make of garage punk that feels weirdly old-fasioned and pleasantly out of touch with most genre developments of the last decade or two. Really, this artifact could have been released anytime between the classic Reatard(s) era and the last gasp of Male Bonding- or No Age-esque melodic fuzz punk in the early 2010s. Now it feels like a bit of an oddity in our times and you all know that's the kind of shit i like best, especially if it comes with such an abundance of strikingly simple, charmingly sloppy and viciously catchy pop tunes of fuzzy, melodic bliss.
Reuben Sawyer has been active for quite a while already with various groups and projects in a wide variety of musical styles, though he only really entered the 12XU universe in 2023 with Demons Obey, his third LP under the Anytime Cowboy moniker, which has been a strange beast for sure in juxtaposing elements of blues-ish and jangly cowpunk- and garage pop with a somewhat surreal, otherworldly quality anchored by Sawyer's uncannily calm vocal delivery. His newest LP now may as well be his strongest, most accomplished one yet, streamlining his previously somewhat cluttered disjointed sonic space into an unexpectedly cohesive whole, making his equally odd, catchy and melancholic compositions - enabled by some next-level songwriting chops - glow and sparkle like never before.
This is exactly one minute of new Eye Ball material. Well guess what, this super-wasteful cassette release via Knuckles on Stun is really freakin' good, as is anything this band has touched so far. Only next time, maybe put like thirty to sixty of these on a tape for it to make any fucking economic and ecological sense.
Considering the rave reactions i've heard so far about this Melbourne group's shows, their good-not-great 2024 debut EP so far had convinced me that their probably incredible live sound has been struggling a bit to translate into recorded form. Well, i can certainly say that this is less of an issue for much of their new mini LP which makes an overall much stronger impression for their sparkling sound that at times kinda reminds me of the psychedelic and variably surf-infused garage rock of Crsytal Stilts and Disappears mixed with a hint of early No Age and maybe White Fence, in addition to the eccentric monotonous fuzz escapades of City Yelps and the ethereal, abstract post punk melancholia of Kitchen's Floor and Mother's Milk... A quirky mixture that is for sure but it works quite admirably. Even when the band runs an acute risk of overstretching their most airy qualities in the record's slow middle stretch, the bet pays off and shit just refuses to come apart, however precarious it might look at first glance..
More exciting eggpunk of the minimalist and fuzz-heavy variety comes to us from this UK-based group whose tunes don't do much to break the established patterns at first glance, but who fucking cares really when every single one hits the nail on the head so effortless and precise in an all-killer succession of snappy and catchy-as-fuck fuzz pop attacks that call to mind a mixture of, say, Elvis 2, Kid Chrome, Power Pants, S.B.F. and Satanic Togas.
I wasn't entirely sold on the novelty-rocker vibes of the bluesy, hard-/dad-rockin' preview tune Hairy Man, but damn, does this new record not only get better from there on (plus, Hairy Man does work a lot better in the album context too), but there's also easily some of the groups best material to be found on here with the following tracks Beef and Fire having plenty of an oldschool Useless Eaters and Pow! feel to them while Out Of Touch gradually dials up the levels of psychedelic haze that we've known at its most pronounced from their previous Perspex LP, before Hell (or rather, the first part thereof) finally kicks open the floodgates of catchy-as-fuck garage punk/fuzz pop goodness as we all know pretty much any Electric Prawns 2 record eventually does. The second circle of Hell (or maybe they're better understood as two seperate songs, both called Hell?) takes all of the above and imbues it with a slightly campy goth note not unlike more recent Powerplant. Other notable highlights are the burst of ultra-classic aussie rock'n'roll that is Piece of Me and the in equal measure melodic and blues-infused bubblegum vibes of Waste, all of it arguably making for their overall strongest record so far. Who would've thought, making albums of conventional length may not be the worst idea after all!
This sheffield dude delighted in 2020/'21 with three excellent EPs of covid lockdown-spawned melodic garage punk and it appears these four tunes have also been languishing on some hard drive in half-finished form since back then and have only recently been given the finishing touches. So no surprises here really - these songs feel like a seamless continuation of that same greatness, once again taking the form of super-catchy no-frills punk tunes that seem to have equal amounts of Buzzcocks and solo-era Jay Reatard in them as well as the high-impact garage blasts of Kid Chrome and, most recently, the simple, fuzzed-out garage-/noise pop hymns of Sex Mex.
