Being in an independent punk rock band can be fun, but it can also be hard work without a guaranteed reward, and The Bobby Lees got to know that better than they hoped while on the road in support of 2022’s Bellevue. Long stretches of low-budget touring and recording albums without recouping their expenses put enormous stress on the group, and founder and leader Sam Quartin was beginning to buckle mentally and physically under the strain; the Bobby Lees went on hiatus in 2023. Fortunately, they had a fan who was willing to help and also happened to be rich and famous — actor Jason Momoa, who featured the band on his HBO series On the Roam, and offered to finance their next album. 2026’s New Self reflects the pain and frustration in the years leading up…
Category: punk
Our good-faith assumption that the slow placidity of part one of this ultimately 5-hour epic was a means of introduction turns out to have been wisely made. Year of the Monkey, the second part of Fucked Up‘s quintuple-album-length trilogy also comprising its second and third hours, takes the increased eventfulness of “Rivers and Lakes,” the closing track of Year of the Goat, and builds from there as the base. “Looking for Heaven and Not Finding It,” opens with the striking of a temple bowl, a common preface to Buddhist prayer, as all of the tracks of this cycle have thus far. The following half-hour is spent in the land of light charted by Yes, with major-key joy and brimming golden dewdrops sprinkled everywhere. This is fitting: the story at this point…
You know you’re listening to a hardcore album when the lyrics that most warm your heart are, “Sit the fuck down, get your guard down.” This intense desire for connection fuels Hammok’s latest album, When Does This Place Become Our Scene. Following their 2024 debut’s within-the-scene success, the Norwegian power trio now finds themselves on the verge of breaking internationally and expanding beyond the expected bounds of hardcore/punk/noise rock, leading to questions like, where are they and who’s with them? It’s good inspiration, as this album shows that the band thrives amidst raw, furious uncertainty.
Repeatedly asking “Is this us or am I alone?” over rampaging drums and guitars that will make you slam yourself into the nearest bystander,…
Where has Ecca Vandal been? Nine years have passed since NME labelled the artist’s self-titled album “one of the year’s brightest debuts” for the way she attacked storming guitar riffs as easily as punchy synth beats. Much like Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes or Nova Twins, Vandal juggled her fiery punk spirit with plenty of vocal dexterity, earning support slots with Incubus and Queens of the Stone Age. But after the pandemic interrupted her momentum, she didn’t come racing out of the blocks to chase after it.
Vandal refused to rush her second album. Carefully crafted in producer Richie Buxton’s bedroom in Melbourne – the city where she grew up after moving from South Africa as a child – she hit reset, bided her time and named…
Introducing a brand new series of ultra rare, vintage concert recordings from notorious NY rowdy punk rockers, Dead Boys, performing their best songs before a homegrown crowd! 2 shows, both recorded at the historic CBGBs club, both capturing one of the rowdiest, raucous musical acts to ever set foot on stage – and digitally remastered to capture all the gory, gruesome glory!
50 years ago this year, the placid seas of British and American rock were disturbed… if not destroyed… by a tsunami of sound arising from the streets of New York City and London. It wasn’t called punk rock yet… just a bunch of bands, disparate in nature and unique in sound, but seemingly bound together by a single common cause. Something must change. Everything must change.
…Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, IRKED’s debut, The Grievance, blazes with their own particular (fire)brand of bruising garage punk with vocals howled by a twirling dervish of pure fury.
Whether it’s in the short, sharp jolt of sub-one-minute rager ‘Running’, or ‘Who Asked’s grim cycle of working and drinking, underlined by the chorus “Why does everybody want to fuck with me?”, the band are never far from spitting out a mouth full of bile.
At times it’s delivered in the form of snark, like in the cutting refrain on ‘Death Cult’ around personal responsibility towards global issues: “Keep up, you’re not doing enough.” Or, similarly, in the lines “Keep off the grass, stay out the sea, don’t piss in the pool, keep ‘em on a lead”…
“Wired for anger, wired for deceit.” Screams of these lines close the title track of Wired, Basement’s fifth studio album. The song is a statement of intent: Basement are as emotionally-driven as they’ve ever been, and they return unshakeable and demanding to be heard.
Wired marks their emergence after an eight-year hiatus from new music. Three years after their support for 2018’s Beside Myself, Basement – vocalist Andrew Fisher, guitarists Alex Henery and Ronan Crix, bassist Duncan Stewart and drummer James Fisher — returned with an appearance at Outbreak Festival in 2022, and various tours and another Outbreak slot to follow. ‘WIRED’, in turn, hears the band’s post-hardcore, emo and grunge elements bottled into one…
Social Distortion has returned with their first album in 15 years. born to kill is led by a pair of singles and follows 2011’s Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, as the Orange County punk rock legends mark a significant comeback on their eighth studio album.
The album opens with the title track. Born To Kill is an anthem of an opener, designed to be listened to loud. Mike Ness sounds absolutely unstoppable as his no-frills but all-powerful guitar tone rips through the soundscape of the driving title track, supporting his signature, gravelly voice that still carries a venomous bite. “Born To Kill,” like most of what is to follow, stays true to what you would expect from Social Distortion; this is punk very much influenced by classic rockabilly.
Chicago’s The Arrivals — well, singer/guitarist Isaac Thotz now lives in L.A., while fellow singer/guitarist Little Dave Merriman, bassist Paddy Costello and drummer Ronnie DiCola have stayed local — uh, have arrived with Payload, their first record in 16 damn years. That gap apparently wasn’t caused by anything other than life getting in the way, but we welcome this return regardless.
Recorded by Meat Wave’s Joe Gac, Payload is essentially hit after hit; it’s punk rock with undeniably ultra-catchy melodies that expertly balances the personal with the political. Thotz’s “Just Like My Brother” begins with quiet guitar strum before kicking in with resounding “whoa-ho-ho-ho” chants; it’s a platonic love song that’s soaring, anthemic and insistent.
With their breakthrough hit ‘Into The Valley’ in 1979, Dunfermline, Scotland’s premier export Skids quickly rose to become one of the most respected and popular bands to emerge from the UK punk and new wave era. Founding members Richard Jobson (vocals) and Stuart Adamson (guitars) were a dynamic combination up front (Adamson went on to even greater commercial success when he later founded Big Country) while the band’s tight, taut sound was grounded by William Simpson on bass and first Tom Kellichan and later Mike Baillie on drums.
Always considered up there with the greatest among their peers – The Jam, Siouxsie And The Banshees, and The Stranglers, for example – both singles and albums showcased…
La Peste was Boston’s first true punk band. The material in this compilation comes from the studio session that produced the Better Off Dead 7”, their 1979 session with The Cars’ Ric Ocasek, a 1979 session at Electro Acoustic Studios, 4-track loft recordings and the the band’s very first studio sessions with Curt Naihersey (Pastiche, The Kids).
Originally formed after frontman Peter Dayton witnessed The Ramones perform at CBGB in 1975, La Peste became one of Boston’s first true punk bands. What started as a group of art students who had never played instruments quickly evolved into a force that helped define the city’s burgeoning punk scene. Despite releasing just one single during their initial run-1978’s ‘Better Off Dead’-the band’s sound and attitude…
The very first release on Frontier Records in March 1980 was an EP by Pasadena’s Flyboys – a power pop/punk band that began in 1977 with singer/songwriter John Curry and Jim “Trash” Decker from The Crowd (and tangentially, Jay from The Simpletones, who would later sign to Posh Boy). Flyboys gigged all over the Southland, paying their dues opening for every national and local punk band from Huntington Beach to Hollywood. They were anything but typical punks with their day-glo clothes, Cuban heels, and maddeningly catchy songs. Infectious hooks and John Curry’s bleached-blonde pompadour were the band’s trademarks.
Lisa Fancher interviewed Flyboys when she was a rock scribe at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The band’s lack of traction…
There’s often a fine line between homage and pastiche, between influence and theft. And all too often, bands fall on the wrong side of that line. Not, however Middleman. The London-based four-piece, who formed just a few years ago, certainly don’t hide who and what their influences are, but rather than crafting a watered-down version of them, they use those influences as a foundation and stepping stone to bring them into now with youthful exuberance and energy.
Caught between power-pop and punk rock, Following the Ghost is the band’s debut LP, and comes off the back of two acclaimed EPs, December 2022’s ‘Cut Out the Middleman’, and 2024’s ‘John Dillinger Died for You’. Raucously unhinged yet simultaneously full of catchy hooks,…
…deluxe anniversary reissue features 11 new tracks, including unreleased demos and remixes with artists Cody Votolato (The Blood Brothers), Youth Code and Kerry McCoy (Deafheaven).
On the second track of Touché Amoré‘s emotional and complicated fourth effort Stage Four, vocalist Jeremy Bolm addresses his late mother — as he does throughout the album, written out of grief, guilt and regret over her passing due to cancer two years ago — and tells her, “I haven’t found the courage to listen to your last message to me.”
The album is a passionately written and deeply moving meditation on loss, and Touché Amoré have never been better as a band. Bolm’s throat-shredding yell tears through most of these lines, reminding us that although…
There are debut albums that arrive with intent, and there are debut albums that arrive like a pneumatic drill through drywall. GNAT, the first full-length from Manchester’s drummer-fronted psych-punk quartet Wax Head – recorded with long-term collaborator Borja Regueira at Manchester’s GLUE Studio and mastered by Melbourne’s Joe Carra – is emphatically the latter: sub-thirty minutes and zero patience for anything resembling restraint.
The title track opens as both decree and detonation: a blitzing, subterranean riff-storm whose fretboard acrobatics would make Dillinger Escape Plan’s Ben Weinman raise an eyebrow. At 90 seconds, it doesn’t so much announce the album as ambush it. ‘Bug Doctor’ follows with equal ferocity, the rhythmic convulsions and…
…On their earliest recordings, Poison Ruïn were a compelling curiosity: an anonymous, no-fi anarcho-punk project, kitted out in chainmail and singing about the plight of the medieval peasantry. Their focus has grown both wider and sharper over the past half-decade, as founding member Mac Kennedy has fleshed out a full lineup and spoken more openly about the band’s intent. He’s learned to walk the fine line between what he’s called “sword for sword’s sake” aestheticism and the use of medieval imagery to make pointed societal critiques. Their second album, Hymns from the Hills, is Kennedy’s view from beyond the proverbial castle walls, and he writes eloquently from that perspective. He expresses solidarity with those “dropped off and discarded…
…4CD deluxe edition include the remastered original album, previously unreleased demos, John Peel Sessions (some never broadcast), and unreleased 1979 concert from Troon.
…Originally released in 1979, Stiff Little Fingers were Ireland’s answer to both the Clash and the Sex Pistols. They had the personal and political stance of the former, and the noisy, pissed off, slash-and-burn musical aesthetic as the latter. Fronted by guitarist and songwriter Jake Burns (he collaborated with journalist Gordon Ogilvie), SLF took off with their two singles “Alternative Ulster,” and, for that time, the utterly out of control screaming that was “Suspect Device.” These two singles make the purchase price of the album a priority. They represent barely contained youthful…
Matinee Acoustic Live at the Prince Albert finds Johnny Moped taking an unexpected turn with an acoustic set that, against all expectations, proves both engaging and highly entertaining. The very idea of a Johnny Moped acoustic performance might raise eyebrows among longtime fans, but the results speak for themselves.
Historically known for their chaotic and unpredictable shows, Johnny Moped have, in recent years, evolved into a far tighter and more dependable live act. That doesn’t mean the band have lost their edge—mistakes still happen, but within the Moped universe, they only add to the charm. What truly drives the performance is the same energy and excitement that has always defined them, and it remains fully intact here.
After 33 years, Guitar Wolf returns to Goner Records, where they started! Way back in 1993, Wolf Rock was released by Goner and immediately, around the world, people enthralled with raw rock n roll and pure Japanese enthusiasm for over-the-top noise realized they had a new band to watch out for.
Many tours, many records, and many eardrums later, Guitar Wolf has returned for the latest, and greatest Guitar Wolf record yet – More Jet. More raw, crunching guitar noise, frantic rhythms, and unpredictable screaming! More head-scratchingly-great song topics! The perfect blend of Link Wray / Ramones / Joan Jett / Cramps sound and attitude mixed with industrial-strength noise.
Led by singer and guitarist Seiji the group’s…
Minneapolis’ VIAL magically met each other through a Tinder post in 2019, brought together by a shared love of 90’s punk, indie, and grunge. Launching into their home scene with their debut Grow Up they quickly became local favorites with everyone from The Current to Music In Minnesota. Signing to LA’s Get Better Records in 2021, their follow up full length, LOUDMOUTH, was an evolution of their indie-pop and alt-rock beginnings but began to hint at other leanings, especially in the tracks “Ego Death” and the fan-favorite “Piss Punk.” A little less reflection on the past and a little more anger at the future.
Even though their third release, burnout, retained the whimsy, the fiercer side of things kept creeping in. Tales of betrayal and teen drama were…