This Maumee, Ohio group has some synth-enhanced power pop-ish garage punk goodness for us on their debut LP whose catchy-as-fuck pop nuggets are constantly steeped in a hazy, uncanny atmosphere and covering a quite decent spectrum ranging all the way from old Lost Sounds, solo Reatard or Digital Leather over the song explosions of early Vagues or King Tuff towards quite recent stuff like Monda, Booji Boys or that incredible Emmett O’Connor LP from last year. A barrage of undeniable earworms whose prevalent sense of melancholy more often than not is met with tons of a quite uplifting, euphoric energy.
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.
Billiam, busy as ever, has just recently blessed us with a new lathe cut 5″ on Low Ambition Records and there’s also a new LP waiting to drop sometime via Erste Theke Tonträger. Before that though, we get this neat odds-and-ends compilation of outtakes, compilation tracks, alternate versions… you know the drill. Some of it you may have heard before in one form or another, some you probably didn’t but one thing’s for sure: Many players in the current garage punk field would be willing to sell their kidneys for these quality scraps and leftovers conveniently compiled on yet another kickass LP.
Shrudd from Louisville, Kentucky already have been a more than notable presence in the garage punk scene for a while but they really hit it out of the ballpark with their first longplayer No Man Is Good Three Times from last winter, leaving behind much of their humble eggpunk beginnings for a more fleshed-out, sophisticated sound very much on the psychedelic, spaced-out side of the garage- and post punk spectrum. A tough record to follow really, but with their first substantial release since then (leaving aside that silly christmas single from late last year) they’re doing a perfect job at that with two flawless new rippers in the previously established sonic spectrum of elaborate and kinda elegant post-/garage punk vaguely in the neighborhood of such groups as Mononegatives, Useless Eaters, Institute, Corker, Marbled Eye, Tube Alloys or Electric Prawns 2, but also very much their own thing really.
The former Synth-/Electro Punk one-man-band Klint based in Schleswig, Germany quite obviously has grown into a duo now and, as i’ve caught wind of some time ago already, is planning to finally hit the stages as a live act at some point and if you thought damn, these vocals sound unfamiliar this time around, then that’s because yes, it’s not the same dude doing the singing here. That minor technicality aside, Klint mostly stick to their winning and still completely unique-sounding formula of synth- and sample-based mayhem and if you dug previous Klint records, there’s no doubt you’ll happily absorb this one too.
I was intrigued when the Brisbane-based label Grog Records (re-)issued the Hello, Mr. Operator EP by New York electro punks Hand Helds on cassette, originally released late last year. A closer look at their bandcamp profile reveals not only that they’ve had a new EP out in January already but also that quite obviously they’ve been at it for a while already, churning out a ton of EPs in a varying spectrum of dark and noisy garage punk, minimalist and often quite harsh synth- and electro punk. I’m pretty sure i already came across them in the past but i’m also reminded why i passed over that stuff back then, as much of their earlier cataloque sounds like the equivalent of throwing lots of shit at the wall to see what’s gonna stick. Anyway, a couple of things have stuck apparetly and on their latest two EPs, things click into place way more tightly thanks to a more minimalist and deliberate less-is-more approach. Hello Mr. Operator is certainly the cruder of the two EPs with a heavily Primitive Calculators and occasionaly Suicide-indebted brand of Synth Punk minimalism. The Transatlantic Death Machine EP then trades in the bass guitar for live drums and things get even wilder and, dare i say, kinda sophisticated, despite the best efforts and dissonant patterns of synth cacophony in tunes like Glue Tongue to obscure the fact. There’s a weird kraut-ish, motorik quality to the whole thing and a successful approach of trimming the fat while giving attention to the details that matter, all of which positions these two records a couple notches above your average electro-kraut effort or no wave-ish ’80s synth punk throwback.
You could easily file these swiss dudes away as yet another artifact of kinda fashionable, Pisse-induced german-language post punk but this stuff is operating on a high level and standing very much on its own two feet with enough identity and ideas of their own to set them apart with a sound that strikes me as just a tad more international, with Rien Pour Moi reminding me a bit of the likes of Ismatic Guru or Landowner for example, while Animal Farm has a bit of an old Giorgio Murderer Vibe. Anyway, even if they won’t be able to shake off that Pisse comparisons just yet, this is a neat and excellent debut EP in its own right and i can’t wait to see where they’ll go from here.
After going all-in on some darker acid rock vibes on their 2024 Buying Time EP, this Stockholm group’s newest one once again steers largely clear of their egg-ish beginnings while returning to a bit of a lighter touch all the same – as much as they be trippin’ here, it’s an altogether pleasurable and joyous trip this time and whatever there may be left of potantially hazardous ’60s psychedelic indulgences in their catchy garage punk is always counterbalanced and lightened up by playful synth accents and other quirky devo-isms that more than once strike me as a more lighthearted equivalent to the recent works of their city neighbors and local synth punk legends Isotope Soap.
The Debut LP of these portuguese fellows delights with a flawless blend of synth-enhanced garage punk that on one hand often feels like a welcome throwback to an earlier, late-2010s era of electrified, egg-ish punk delirium of the Set-Top Box, Research Reactor Corp. variety with additional touches of Ausmuteants, S.B.F. and Kid Chrome’s heavy-duty riffing, while all the same feeling stylistically equally well-connected to somewhat more recent artifacts by the likes of Beef, The Gobs, Kerozine, Factory City Children and, most of all, 3D and The Holograms. So, certainly not reinventing the wheel here but nonetheless this is fun and well-executed shit that any genre aficinado shouldn’t miss out on.
Brilliant garage-/egg-/synth punk fare on this neat debut EP by some Montreal-based dude or group that i completely missed when it was first released as their contribution to Demo Fest 2025. Now here’s my second chance and damn, this is some good shit right here! The toy keyboard-meets-hammond-organ sound of the first two tracks brings me right back to some earlier days of (proto-) egg madness and particularly of those Mark Cone records from 2016/’17 respectively, while the next pair of tunes has a bit more of an electronic, industrial yet still absolutely playful feel somewhere inbetween the worlds of, say, Beef and R. Clown, before the closing track, a Violet Femmes cover tune, quite plausibly gives away one of the primary inspirations for this whole mess.
