The end of punk summer

What's up, friends? After my prolonged absence, and with summer's heat nearing its end, I thought it was high time to share what I've been blasting in my office these past few months. And let me tell you, it's been a real punk summer over here. In a way, it's felt like reconnecting with my roots, the kind of music I obsessed over as a kid who had a studded vest and a Nausea back patch. Since I've got a lot of recommendations for you, let's not waste any time and get to it. Oh, by the way, you may want to open this one in your browser. It's long.

Absolut, Käng Munk Demo

Though I've been aware of Toronto's Absolut for about a decade now, their early material never thrilled me. I thought their full-lengths were serviceable metal-tinged D-beat, but despite having a soft spot for that sound, I never returned to them with any regularity. Then Absolut dropped the Käng Munk Demo earlier this year which features demos for their new LP along with a Gang Green cover, and goddamn does this ever scratch an itch. Maybe it's the more primal production, or perhaps they are finally locking into a sound that feels more distinct, but I've listened to this tape's opening track "To Dream…" more than almost anything else this year.

I find such beauty in what I like to call "cusp records," the albums where a band is pushing a specific sound to its outermost limit, and it's just beginning to transform into something distinctly different. So much of what I love about early death metal is how you can hear them twisting the framework of thrash metal until it is just beginning to feel like a completely new genre. With the Käng Munk Demo, I hear a band that's indebted to a genre's history while bringing plenty of clever flairs to the table. Even if the forthcoming LP doesn't capture the power of this demo, that's fine, this tape is fantastic enough as it is.

Alienator, Time To Die

Speaking of a hybrid of metal and punk, the new Alienator seven-inch feels like another fantastic example of a band mining '80s thrash without going full crossover. The tight-picked riffs and lightning-quick cymbal grabs call to mind Slayer's Show No Mercy, or maybe even Hirax, played by Negative Approach. It's equally mean and evil, making for a seven-inch I want to just keep flipping over until I've had my fill.

Bless, Not For You

While I don't want to crib from my above Absolut blurb, a lot of what I said there also applies to Bless from Kuopio, Finland. Given that Not For You's artwork prominently features someone in a studded vest wearing a Disclose back patch, you could likely assume what this sounds like without ever clicking play. However, as I learned firsthand, those assumptions weren't totally accurate.

With a nod from my bud Evan Minsker at see/saw (go subscribe, you won't regret it) I tossed on the new Bless EP and was floored by it. I can't say with complete certainty why this connected so much more immediately than Bless' earlier material but I've got some theories. While it's steeped in blown-out, fuzzy D-beat, the guitars here sound like they're veering toward an approximation of that Swedish death metal tone and bringing it into the raw punk formula. Add in some passionate dual vocals and the fact that only one song crests the two-minute mark, and this is the sound of Bless finding a sound that feels more impassioned and distinct.

Full of Hell, Coagulated Bliss

"Full of Hell? Isn't that a metal band?" Yes, yes, but whatever, this record was a real revelation for me earlier this year. Though opinions vary wildly on this band's output—in part because there is just so much of it—Coagulated Bliss might be their very best release yet.

In a way, I've always viewed Full of Hell as a band that took a while to find what they wanted to be and then slowly lost their grip on what made them special. 2017's Trumpeting Ecstasy saw the band perfect their mix of grindcore, death metal, powerviolence, and noise, only to mix with the ratios on subsequent albums and never quite have them hit the same again. At times, it felt like Full of Hell was more concerned with pushing boundaries than writing songs, an artistic impulse that is often less rewarding for the listener than the creator.

Thankfully, Coagulated Bliss solves those issues. Full of Hell not only sounds self-assured again, but they're willing to take risks that don't feel nearly as contrived as they had recently. The result is that the songs feel more like songs, with an emphasis on catchy riffs, borderline sing-along moments, and even some bits of saxophone that don't feel like some strange novelty. Hearing a record like Coagulated Bliss is a reminder that, as frustrating as it may be, art often doesn't progress linearly. Sometimes to make something distinct you have to search around until you find something that actually sticks. It's why, no matter how far removed a band is from my perceived golden era, I'll always give their new music a shot because sometimes you end up surprised in the best possible way.

H.A.R.M., Con Safos

Not to turn this entry on H.A.R.M.'s excellent debut album Con Safos into a diatribe on the broader state of the scene, but I do find it incredibly telling that the response to the resuscitated 625 Thrashcore label has not made much of a splash. To a degree, I get it, this kind of ultra-fast, grind-leaning hardcore is not really what's in at the moment. But for Max Ward to return to releasing records—and great ones at that—after a long period of dormancy, and to see almost no chatter about it, strikes me as a depressing sign of the times. But maybe that's all by design.

H.A.R.M. is a prime example of a band functioning in a way that's at a complete remove from how you're "supposed to" do things these days. There's no real online footprint to speak of aside from an EP and a split uploaded to Bandcamp. As far as I can tell, Con Safos was released on vinyl in a hyper-limited edition of 300 copies, and I don't think anyone's ripped this thing and uploaded it to YouTube yet. It's a release created by the heads, for the heads.

At its core, this kind of music was always made by fridge weirdos for incredibly small scenes. It was never meant to be big, because these sub-minute blasts of grinding noise are meant for the people already in the know. Lately, watching so many bands present themselves as weirdo outsiders only to fall in line with the music industry's best practices all feels a little cheap to me. I've heard people call this anti-digital approach "corny," which makes me think I have a very different definition of the word given how I shudder every time I see a band announce a "merch drop" with a TikTok promotional campaign. If people refuse to see validity in an album because the band opted not to turn it into a piece of steaming data, then it's a truly sad state of affairs.

All that is to say, if you see a copy of Con Safos at a local record store, buy it. Put it on your turntable, guess what speed it's supposed to be played at (the center labels offer no hints here), and enjoy the pure fury on display for those precious few minutes. It's not for everyone, but if you're lucky enough to hear it, then it just might be for you.

Kriegshög, Love & Revenge

Much like Babe Ruth, earlier this year I pointed out to the stands and said that Spectral Voice's Sparagmos stood a great chance of being my album of the year. Sure, I hedged a bit, but I was pretty confident about it at the time. While there are other contenders in the metal realm, on the punk side of things Kriegshög's long-awaited second album is easily my favorite album of the year. But I didn't think that would be the case when I first played it.

Not that aesthetic is everything, but I found the album cover not only lacking, but it read like a statement that the band was going in the wrong direction. The Japanese D-beat greats excelled at delivering pummeling hardcore, and seeing an album cover that was just black text on a deep red background felt like a statement that they'd be renouncing their past or reinventing themselves into a weaker, more palatable format. Shockingly, that's sort of what they did here, and it works far better than I could have imagined.

For their chosen style, some of the songs on Love & Revenge are long. I mean, a nearly four-minute D-beat song is a gigantic ask, but a single listen to "虚空" is proof enough that Kriegshög doesn't just know what they are doing, they're doing something few other bands have ever been capable of. This is a more polished, hook-forward take on the band's classic sound, with tracks like "Grey Agony"—listen to this song once and it will be stuck in your head for a week, I guarantee it—sounding so outright anthemic, you could sing along with it and not know a single word of what you're saying.

In essence, Kriegshög have made a gateway record to the worlds of raw punk and Japanese hardcore. Will I end up hating them for it in five years when a bunch of people pretend like they've always been listening to Rattus and Tampere SS? Sure, probably. But for now, I just want people to hear this record and understand you can make real, genuine hardcore punk that's forward-thinking without resorting to opportunistic genre-hopping or watering down the formula. All hail Kriegshög!

The Massacred, Death March

The second seven-inch from Boston's The Massacred is a prime example of what people referencing '80s hardcore should be doing, which is remembering that "'80s hardcore" was a global movement, not one solely isolated to the United States. The early material from The Massacred showed a lot of promise but, in my eyes, wasn't fully realized. Now, with Death March, the band has made their arrival known. Taking pieces of UK82, the Headcleaners discography, and early Boston hardcore, The Massacred essentially set their sights on a specific calendar year from the genre's past and found a way to build a link between all those disparate movements. It's a near-perfect hardcore punk seven-inch made even better by the fact that, much like the H.A.R.M. LP, you can't stream this thing in full anywhere. I'm enjoying the trend of bands actually doing things the old-school way, and it's another example of how thrilling it is to mailorder a record without having heard a lick of it only to have your hair blown back the second you drop the needle on it. Highly recommended.

No Knock, Imagine a World Without Landlord​$​

The most exciting thing coming out of New York City these days has been the emergence of the Peace of Mind label. I'm not fully sure who is running the thing, but I do know that earlier this year, since they don't have an online store, I had to do the digital version of stuffing money into an envelope and hoping a record showed up when I Venmo'd some random person $15 for a tape and seven-inch. Weeks later, both things showed up at my door and, of course, the tape didn't even work (more on that later).

With a half-dozen releases under their belts, Peace of Mind has been chronicling the emerging crusty, peace-punk movement that calls back to the city's '80s scene. That's right, New York hardcore wasn't always what you know it as, there were bands like Nausea and False Prophets and, strangely, Winter, pulling more from UK peace-punk and the anarcho proclamations of bands like Crucifix from California.

I freely admit this seven-inch's title is pretty cringy but even that feels part of the whole deal. This is raging, unhinged anarchist punk from a city that used to be a hot bed for it, and I love seeing it come back. I'm glad we're back to an era where people are cramming eight songs on a seven-inch again. May that never go out of style.

Shellac, To All Trains

When Steve Albini died in May I saw two reactions across my social media feeds. On one side, people were lovingly sharing their reverence for the man and his work. On the other side, people used it as an opportunity to excoriate the man, both for the unseemly parts of his past and, strangely, for being a sellout who didn't fully commit to those things as he aged. While I respect everyone's polarized takes on the man, and I'm sure he would as well, what remains is a body of work that cracked my skull open and changed the way I viewed music as an impressionable 13-year-old. Should I have owned a copy of Songs About Fucking at that age? Probably not. Did it make me reframe the very idea of what punk was or what it could be? Absolutely. As you've likely seen throughout this whole piece, I still carry that with me to this day. It's why I still viewed Shellac as a punk band more than anything else. They were probably more post-hardcore or noise-rock or whatever artier title is befitting of a band that routinely made alienating creative decisions just because, but I think that all comes back to Albini's original vision of punk.

To All Trains doesn't deviate from what Shellac had always sounded like, but that's also no great sin to me. I never read them as a band interested in reinvention as much as honing a craft. They sharpened the point until it was as fine as it possibly could be, and having one more album of razorwire guitars, deep bass grooves, and room-shaking drums is, quite simply, a beautiful thing. Even as the fanfare has died down in the time since Albini's passing, I remain appreciative of that body of work, and I'm glad there was one last entry into the files before time was up.

SUMAC, The Healer

When I interviewed Aaron Turner ahead of the release of The Healer back in June, I was listening to this album almost daily. In a matter of plain fact, I can think of very, very few albums that nearly touch 80 minutes in length that I've listened to as much as I have The Healer.

For my money, this is a perfect album. It's not an easy listen, but that is what makes it so deeply rewarding. It's a perfect balance of cerebral and emotional, tapping into your most human vulnerabilities with songs that don't follow any expected path. I feel distinctly privileged to have seen SUMAC live and watched them evolve into a band of this nature. They remain something so singular and special that I feel blessed to exist at a time when people are making records like this.

Witness, Demo

Remember that tape I referenced in the No Knock blurb that arrived and didn't have any music on it? It was this one. Yet I was so committed to getting this thing in my possession that I ordered it again and, by the grace of some higher power, a second copy arrived that was correctly dubbed.

While there's not much I can tell you about Witness, because the liner notes to that thing are a hand-scrawled mess (complimentary) what I can tell you is that this is some truly outsider hardcore punk. The recording of this demo is so bad (also complimentary) that I'd be shocked if this wasn't all recorded in one single take. The guitar jumps in volume seemingly any time the guitarist steps on a pedal, which is the kind of amateur-level thing that might make plenty of people run for the hills. The vocals take on an almost goregrind quality here, with toilet vocals and shrill screams bouncing back and forth off one another. The bass has the tonal quality of half-dead rubber bands stretched and strummer (by now you have to know these descriptors are complimentary, right?) and the only consistent, coherent element is the drums, which are far tighter than you'd imagine from something like this.

I don't really know what this is, I don't know if it would come across nearly as well live as it does on this demo, but whatever it is, I love it. One of the more compelling releases I've heard this year and, frankly, one of the best, too.

Classic pick from the shelf: The Jesus Lizard, Goat

This one is already mighty long but, ever since Evan graciously asked me to interview The Jesus Lizard's Duane Denison for see/saw, I've been listening to their albums basically non-stop. While I don't have much to say that I didn't already in that interview, I do need to note that Goat may be one of the finest rock records ever crafted. A perfect melding of inventive riffs, churning rhythms, unhinged vocal performances, and madmen-caught-on-tape production courtesy of the aforementioned Steve Albini. It's easy to overlook the classics as you get older, either because you've overplayed them or because it just feels trite to extoll their virtues for the thousandth time. I certainly struggle with the latter almost any time I sit down to write one of these but to get to spend so much of this summer in the company of this album, is something I'll forever be grateful for.