Plenty of people turn to punk seeking an escape; Nick Vicario needed distance from the thing itself. As a player in West Coast bands like Crisis Man, Cower, and Public Eye, the Oregon-born musician has spent most of his life abiding by hardcore ethos both onstage and off, for better or for worse. When he relocated to Los Angeles and launched his mostly-solo project Smirk with 2021’s scuzzy, lo-fi LP, he was indulging in the reckless, destructive behaviors that tend to be more alluring in song than in practice. In a breakthrough moment he says came to him as a gradual epiphany rather than a dispatch from rock bottom, Vicario realized drugs had taken too much control over his life. With his third Smirk album, Speculative Fiction, he’s on the side of recovery — but it…
Category: punk
Guttural screams, desperate moans and disaffected, dragged-out deliveries suffuse the Canadian quatuor’s second release. Reformulating some of their debut album’s mix of hardcore and folk (it’s aptly named Violence), Truck Violence delivers a more suffocating and altogether weary vision of the world. Not without reason: increasing climate catastrophes globally and rising fascism in the Western sphere have inspired the band, undoubtedly. The weathervane is my body, though, finds a glimpse of light amidst the hail.
Their first album under San Franciscan label The Flenser, Truck Violence keeps up with traditions of old-school hardcore, starting with DIY production and a straight edge attitude sprinkled with a healthy dose of irony.
Fire Man’s Caio Brentar has a warbly, emotion wracked tenor, a way with melody and an affinity for loud, distorted guitar. His first full-length (following three cassette EPs) explores the same nervy, amplified but vulnerable and ultra-anthemic/romantic neighborhood inhabited by Cloud Nothings and the Japandroids. He works here with just one other musician, drummer and producer Kiyoshi Chinzei, alternating between naked confessional simplicity and blaring garage rock, sometimes within the space of one song.
“Marry Me,” for instance, fluctuates from clanky, post-punk bass and drums to fey, indie pop verse to an exhilarating blast of guitar riffage. The verse extolling the loved one’s virtues is quiet, but the storm of angst and hormones she…
Dead Pioneers’ Wagon Burner arrives just in time for the United States’ 250th birthday, and it is the gift the country deserves and needs right now: An indigenous voice of reason taking the actual history of the country to task and rallying those of us who aren’t licking boots to unite and fight back. The band’s spiritual peers include timeless groups like Minutemen, Suicidal Tendencies, Public Enemy, and Dead Kennedys, bands that functioned as the alternative CNN of their time.
As a punk rock record, it’s a blast, an anthemic, catchy collection of tracks that shows Dead Pioneers gelling. Throughout, Deal and guests weave spoken word pieces into their incendiary tour of the many shades of punk, and its 12 songs are barbed with humor and an invitation…
A decade in the making, Public Luxury is an unashamedly political exercise that never strays into preaching to the converted.
Delivered mostly in Spanish, it’s a blast of heat and light in dark times. Imagine early Pixies but they’re only playing Isla de Encanta and Kim isn’t letting Black Francis near the mic. And it’s not all screams and shouts; on tracks such as ‘Yellow Sun’, there’s a melodic softness that reveals a fragility under the surface, something which might even appeal to fans of The Killers.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that an album that was ten years in the making may have a disjointed edge. That’s a blessing and a curse of course, the stylistic twists and turns offer something fresh with each track but makes for a slightly more…
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…
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…