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.
This Bay Area-dwelling group entered the scene with a bang when their 2021 debut cassette dropped and their second LP Instant Pop Expressionism Now! then only further affirmed them as a driving force in the current art punk landscape, which is not all too surprising really once you notice we're dealing with folks who, mainly in the previous decade, have been dabbling about in groups like The World, Andy Human and the Reptoids, Rays and Violent Change. Their third longplayer out via Siltbreeze Records now feels a lot more rustic and brittle than their predecessor, relying heavier on odd iterludes while going lighter on immediately catchy hooks and moments but it's exactly that kind of frugal stinginess that actually makes this record all the more enchanting and rewarding by adding a certain layer of early The Fall-esque repitition that really starts to kick in during In Any Case, and a signature refusal to serve the listener any easy payoff or comforting resolution to the built-up tensions, dissonant loops and patterns. The dub flourishes and techniques in Where The Dream Dwells then have more of a Swell Maps feel to them and maybe, in more recent years, the early works of Exek. Flash #1 on the other hand seems to give extensive tribute to Wire as it could well fool you into thinking you're listening to an excellent Pink Flag outtake, with a bit of a Television and Fall vibe tacked on for good measure, after which Embankment Terror ventures even further into the more pop-oriented side of that early Wire era. So yeah, once again this sounds like a representative round-trip through much of old british DIY- and art punk at times with groups like Mekons, Desperate Bicycles, Membranes, Television Personalities and the aforementioned Swell Maps and Wire coming to mind but at the same time, these tunes have a lot in common with a newer breed of art punk acts aswell in the vein of Cuticles, Famous Logs In History, Onan Servo, Toe Ring and Germ House just to name a couple of 'em.
Much of this Chicago group's output so far felt just a bit too vague and impalable for me to make sense of it but their new longplaying debut now is playing in a different league altogether. I'm tempted to spew a platitude about how their sound is "clicking into sharp focus" here but really, it's more of an intentional soft-focus putting their jangly melange of power pop, art-, garage- and psych rock, splashes of '90s indie rock and '80s Flying Nun Records-esque psychedelia in just the right light. This shit sounds like something that should've been released about 15 years ago and looking back, it makes me wonder how it happened that particular, timeless subniche kinda went largely dormant since then. Or rather, it kinda was there in the margins all along, just waiting for an impressive, quality release like this to occur and, hopefully, shock the genre out of its self-indulgent mediocrity. There's a surreal, hypnagogic vibe pervading these tunes i probably haven't heard so strikingly since the early works of Rat Columns and Blank Realm at the beginning of the 2010s, though other, more garage-leaning stuff from that same era also comes to mind like the equally jangly and foggy early days of White Fence or Apache Dropout and i can't help but find a distinct note of '90s shoegazers Flying Saucer Attack in there as well. This is just the kind of wondrous, off-kilter weirdo pop album i didn't quite realize i've been missing so much since then.
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.
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.
Just like that Celebrators LP i've just posted, the debut LP of Oamaru, New Zeeland group Cuticles is yet another really freakin' good 21-song LP that could have become a freakin' brillian 15-song LP just by cutting some fat but ya know... i'm not gonna complain about such an abundance of good, especially if that shit is so fucking up my alley. Featuring members of 2010s NZ DIY punk staples Moonrakers and Trendees, this group, which first really caught my attention with their excellent 2023 EP Pavlova, certainly shares some of that shambolic avantgarde DNA but channels it into a much more catchy and melodic whole, trading in much of that raw Half Japanese-style mayhem for a more approachable aesthetic, reminiscent among others of old british DIY acts in the neighborhood of Swell Maps, Television Personalities, Mekons and Desperate Bicycles. There's a good deal of old Flying Nun energy goin' on aswell plus some stray occurences of the more pop-focused end of the Pink Flag-era Wire spectrum in tunes like Making Up Shit. If i had to come up with more recent bands as comparisons, i'd say New York's Famous Logs in History, Philadelphia group Society and the early works of Adelaide's own Wireheads don't strike my as totally off either.
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.
Expectations are always through the roof with a new Electric Prawns 2 record but so far they've never disappointed and these two new tunes won't either, showing the group 100% in their element, City Streets being the kind of psych-infused garage punk smasher based around a strong and simple hook they've always excelled in and Be With You Tonight once again showcasing the group's supreme power pop instincts. After a half-year long break that almost feels like an eternity with this group following their incredibly prolific 2024-2025 streak, our favorite australian hallucinogenic hit factory still doesn't show any signs of wear.
This South Carolina group's previous This Has To Be Hell EP didn't quite cut it for me yet but this more consistent and fleshed-out successor now is sure worth a post here, a kinda weird bastard inbetween somewhat eggpunk-ish synth squeaks and fuzzed-out space punk of the Corpus Earthling and Zoids variety with nothing terribly new or smart happening here but their staunch dedication to its simple formula just sells this shit for me.
The 2025 Modern Tension EP by this London, Ontario group, grown out of the ashes of the psychedelic garage- and post punk sensation Mononegatives. was already a quite promising, if still inconsistent mess of a record. These two new tunes now show some significant progress as evidenced by a more fleshed-out approach to their songcraft and a more deliberate, well-balanced sound increasingly leaning away from the garage punk attacks of yesteryear and way heavier into the melodic post punk vibes for an aesthetic that feels just as hazy and spaced-out as the old Mononegatives records while also forging its own, distinct path forward that may actually have have some surface-level similarities to current post punk acts of the Corker, Marbled Eye and Tube Alloys variety.
