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.
Whippets are a Madison, Wisconsin group featuring Bobby Hussy and Typer Spatz known from both Wristwatch and The Hussy among other things. Now while i'm all over that last Wristwatch LP i've always had a harder time warming up to much of the previous Whippets output with especially their 2024 debut LP just treading too heavily on a too well-trodden post grunge path for my taste. This new one i get a lot more out of, even though there are still some isolated instances of undercooked song construction like in Dream Of Two, where the dudes just rely too heavy on a nothingness of two not particularly thrilling, pretty basic musical phrases. There are way more hits than misses on this record though, which kinda strikes me as sort of a Wristwatch offshoot steering that band's garage punk leanings closer towards a more ambitious mid-90s to early 2000s indie- and alt rock aesthetic that just happens to test my '90s kid patience when it sometimes just feels a bit too heavy-handed in its mid-tempo earnestness or the song substance just ain't quite up to snuff to make that shit stick. This is by no means a flawless record but whenever it actually achieves liftoff, it soars to impressive heights.
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!
There's no arguing with the no-frills dumb excitement these dutch fellas generate on their debut 7" coming to us via Spain's punk powerhouse label Discos Enfermos. This is just the perfect fusion of oldschool garage punk and Oi!, seventies butt-/sleaze rock and maybe a bit of NWOBHM-style riffing for good measure? Anyway, that shit absolutely rips, just don't think about it too much. Among other things, i'm sure admirers of the Golden Pelicans era are gonna get a real kick out of this.
Now here's a true mystery band for ya that may well originate from earth's inner core or from Saturn's rings or Bavaria or the nth circle of hell, or maybe i'm just imagining the whole thing i don't know what the fuck is going on here. But in case that shit's actually real, i'll try to describe it as the sort of at best tangentially egg-infused, spaced-out psych punk of the most out-there and deraged breed, the kind you'd imagine being blown through the raptured speaker cone of some ancient haunted AM radio coming alive and blaring away each night in an abandoned shopping mall or hospital building or whatever. Quite appropriately, these broadcasts themselves are about as impenetrable as any old numbers station dispatch, probably unrivaled in the 12XU class of '26 in terms of sheer unsettling disorientation as these tunes appear intentionally set-up to catastrophically fail at any moment in unpredictable ways but rather miraculously, the fragile structures holding things in place here, as much as they keep swaying and creaking incessantly, never quite collapse, but rather even expose a good deal of quite catchy garage hooks under their deep layers of grime and fuzz. Though not completely unheard of in our spheres - i'll say Psychal have a number of spiritual peers in the likes of Zoids, Silicon Heartbeat, Corpus Earthling, Mateo Manic or Thee Hearses for example - you've rarely encountered a specimen of this kind going quite as far in its boundless excess of acid rock depravity.
Leicester, England dude Roo Stafford appears to be on a roll right now, firing off another batch of first-rate garage punk projectiles just about a couple weeks after the pretty fucking excellent Stoned & Running EP. This time i get a less pronounced sense of 2010s proto-egg vibes and am instead reminded a lot of different groups from that same era á la Kid Chrome, S.B.F., Urochromes or Andy Human & The Reptoids, though beyond that welcome flashback to what i'll call 12XU's formative years, this kind of shit has also been kept alive in recent times by the likes of Jean Mignon or D. Sablu for example. Anyway, this is yes another viciously addictive treat of this particular kind.
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.
This dude from Lawrence, Kansas who's apparently also been making sick noises with the likes of Ghoulies (not to be confused with the australian egg punks of the same name), Jackoffs and Drastic Plastic, now has another quite enticing treat for us in the form of a solo cassette that captivates right away with a make of somewhat glam-, southern rock and power pop-infused garage punk goodness that sits somewhere in the neighborhood of the early Sheer Mag singles, early works of Powerplant and more recently the incredible Elvis 2 LP. The last two tracks can't quite live up to that level of brilliance but damn, for such a quick-shot effort written and recorded in just a couple weeks this ain't shabby at all. Looking forward to more.
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.
So let me try to get this right. It appears this new-ish Soft Shoulder LP ain't so much a compilation of stuff released on various lathe-cut EPs and -singles over the past couple years rather than a collection of songs recorded years ago that deliberately first got put out in that piecemeal way starting in 2022, but was intended from day one to eventually make up a full LP, which we now have in front of us. Phew, that sure is some kind of clunky roundabout way of doing things and i'll say it's just fitting for one of the most intentionally clunky, roundabout types of bands of our time, one that's been around way longer than this blog, is probably gonna outlast it too and has never failed to amaze with their cluttered and messy, though also totally unmistakable, singular vision of vagely The Fall-inspired, No Wave-informed post punk and noise rock. And you know what? I think it's the greatest thing the (in its current incarnation) one-man-band from Tempe, Arizona has ever done even after the knockout double whammy of 2023s Smile Building's Exit and It’s A Small World After LPs, as i'll say these new old tunes hit even harder in their collected, re-sequenced new form - so much creativity and brilliance concentrated into a dense 21-song 45-minute record that refuses to get tedious for even a second and the added punch and clarity of a stellar new mastering job also sure contributes a good bit to making this thing gel together and rise way above just the sum of its parts.
