They've been around for way longer than i first realized, this Cleveland, Ohio group featuring, among others, Mickey Mocnik of Nervosas fame who's later also been making awesome noise with The Missed and, most recently, Vital Stress. Anyway, last year's Adaptor EP certainly saw the group move on a bit from their earlier sound dominated by echoes of late '80s, early '90s punk and indie rock-ish vibes with a slight touch of Fastbacks toward a more fleshed-out, kinda contemporary-feeling, yet also perfectly timeless brand of fuzzy, garage-y noise pop with some subtle traces of psychedelia and post punk on top. On this new one, they once again channel their energies into an even more catchy and compact bundle of tunes which once again call to mind mostly 2010s groups like Feature, UV-TV, Slowcoaches or Monster Treasure.
Vague Fugue already had a neat EP out last year even though that one still suffered a bit from a kinda plain production aesthetic which brought out a bit too much of a middle-of-the-road garage dadpunk vibe to fully vibe with me. I dunno, it just didn't feel quite appropriate or flattering to their sound, a stark difference to the muddy LoFi fog of this new tape, which frames their anachronistic mayhem as just the kind of drugged- and fuzzed-out satan worshipping acid rock the first EP already strongly hinted at, but couldn't quite sell. This shit sounds perfect right here and it definitely helps that the underlying song material, while still simple raw and primitive, never drops the ball once and omits any unnecessary noodling around and jam band wankery this time.
Chubby's still new-ish band EZ8 has now been properly renamed The Easy Eight and also has their first LP out via Static Shock Records which, to be fair, is actually just the first EP extended with four new tunes, which is also fine 'cos that EP was plenty awesome enough to be listened to over and over again and the new tracks are just as marvellous in that trademark Oi! / Power Pop fusion that only Chubby and his co-conspirators can pull off so infectiously. A good catchy tune and a stubborn, tight performance is all that's needed here, simple as that. I mean, what else do you expect of a new Chubby record? A progressive rock opera in nine chapters? No, you'll get this beauty instead, though there's still a couple of neat flourishes we haven't heard from any of his previous groups like that bit dungeon-esque oldschool heavy metal shredding throughout the verses of Fear As A Gift.
Damn, this Chicago group's noise must've already sounded quite archaic at the time their first LP dropped in 2013 but now, more than decade since their last recorded output, their sound has passively made it full circle back into the pleasantly old-fashioned, timeless and classy bracket of anachronistic noise, their sound clearly taking cues from the likes of Lync, early Jawbreaker and Superchunk or, to a lesser extent, Dag Nasty, Rites Of Spring and maybe also some traces of early Unwound and Hoover? Anyway, these tunes are operating on a level quite a few notches above your average '90s punk throwback, chiefly owing to an abundance of rock-solid songcraft all throughout and an unwavering intuition for timeless heavy-duty, load-bearing hooks, while also leaving plenty of wiggle room for some neat diversions and moments not quite fitting the standard early '90s postcore / emo / indie rock templates like that bit of a Wipers- and Dead Moon-esque garage flavor added to tunes like Caustic Dreams. It's this skillful balance of what strikes me as a quite intimate, encyclopedic knowledge and love of that particular patch of 90s punk history coupled with a marked reluctance to comply with its tropes and conventions too slavishly, adding even more of a unique flavor to a record that's not ashamed to feel vagely nostalgic and retro at points without ever coming across like a tired retread, still able to subvert and exceed my expectations in crucial places, a record equally inspired and old-fashioned.
Just about half a year after their brilliant previous Weston-le-Clay EP, its successor sees the Warford, England group once again upping their game in terms of both variety and compact-/catchyness of their, at times, subtly math-infused post punk, most significantly expanding on the more midtempo-ish section of their stylistic repertoire and as expected, that shit works just admirably here 'cos this dude (or these dudes?) clearly has the creative juice and raw musicality to pull that shit off. Just as before, smartypants contemporary post punk influences of the Landowner variety loom large over this one too, just as do ancient british DIY art punk staples from a quite diverse sphere inbetween, say, Mekons, Blurt and Television Personalities, though at the same time, Aidmoozic sound very much like themselves here more than ever. The seeds of this greatness were already noticeable on their two 2024 EPs, but Aidmoozic play on a whole different level in 2026 and i'm gonna say that in these short few recent months, Aidmoozic have catapulted themselves onto the cutting edge of contemporary art punk with razor-sharp, though seemingly effortless, precision.
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.
Kaloomps, British Columbia group Headcheese have been messin' about for way longer than my intuition tells me as it still feels to me like their first Demo and self-titled debut mini-LP dropped just about yesterday, even though their most recent previous record Expired is actually like three years old by now. Anyway, this group has certainly left a thorough impresson in my faulty memory with a number of records that feel like an endless tug-of-war between successive impulses of elaborating on their sound and then dumbing it down again in the most thrilling way possible. Their newest one might well be their magnum opus so far though, with the group operating as a simultaneously tighter and rowdier-than-ever wrecking crew, pummeling into submission their most coherent, fleshed out bundle of chemically unstable creative outbursts so far, which no serious devotee of inventive, shaggy noise inbetween the worlds of KBD-injected garage punk, oldschool propulsive west coast-style hardcore and maybe even some particles of No Trend-, Broken Talent- or Flipper-esque proto noise rock mahem should miss out on.
Normally i tend to just skip this kind of a teaser release but it's been a slow summer anyway and this shit coming from a Glasgow, UK group is simply too freaking brilliant to not post here, a massive step up after their already really neat demo from last fall and i simply can't wait till the full 7" containing these two songs drops sometime later this year hopefully, for more of that cleverly conceived and infectiously catchy-and-noisy-as-fuck oldschool hardcore mayhem.
Philadelphia's Sims Hardin aka Society probably doesn't need an introduction here after the splashes he made with the deliciously scrappy 2022 EP All Flies Go To Hell, whose rough proto punk-ish energy subsequently got channeled into a more concrete, fleshed out art punk sound on 2024's brilliant Social Flies cassette, to which Reign Of Flies now feels like a direct sequel, but not without some clear refinements and growth along the way, setting this record apart with a more pronounced post punk-ish vibe to these tunes and a tighter grip on his catchy hooks than ever before. Yeah this is another must-have for connoisseurs of rough, artsy and eccentric DIY punk oddities.
The modern-day cowcore veterans from Austin, Texas return just a year after their quite good but also a bit too long and somewhat disjointed previous dose of pure chaos that was the Miracle Whip-It LP on Digital Hotdogs. This new EP now is in a way the exact opposite of that, their most condensed and coherent record so far with all the excess fat removed, eight minutes of super-dense excellence bursting at the seams from an abundance of clever ideas, heavy duty hooks and melodies in a massive spell of heavily Dicks-informed insanity.
