"I always feel the most comfortable in the punk world because they want to be hated, which I find funny. Pink Flamingos was a punk movie. We even had the yellow, the color hair. You couldn't buy the color back then, you had to do it with India ink and magic marker. So we were always punk. In a way it was a great freedom when that came. And punks are my people still."
Brighton was rarely described as a scene, despite being home to Nick Cave and Paul McCartney and hothousing a surge of remarkable young talent that's still thriving more than 20 years later.
It's time for 2026 California to wake up to the fact that Sib, Joe Sib, is a contender for the Best of Us Award. It's wildly rare to have an artist like Sib who crosses over from being in the early punk rock scene to co-founding SideOneDummy Records and discovering talent like Flogging Molly.
I dreamed of curating a tour with my favourite bands that could bring some positivity in our troubled times. I'm thrilled that this is actually happening this summer with the Things Can Only Get Better Tour... Our aim is to bring some joy with the banging pop anthems that we all know and love.
Girl Trouble are the Northwest's garage rock demigods, revered by all from Neko Case and Mudhoney to Soundgarden and Beat Happening. On As Is, their first album in over a decade, vibrato guitar collides rollin' and tumblin' into bedrock beats and black crow vocal calls; it's rock'n'roll done in a backwoods style.
A special 50th anniversary Punk Rock history event at The New Farm featuring bands and musicians from the dawn of the punk rock revolution of San Francisco. NO ALTERNATIVE, SLEEPERS AD, SOCIETY DOG plus AVENGERS guitar player GREG INGRAHAM performing with JEAN CAFFEINE, THE DEAD SAILOR GIRLS & INSECT LOUNGE.
Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootleg jazz, boogie woogie and rock 'n' roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.
You could go anywhere in America and argue with some success for the cultural impact wrought by most of the once-subcultural stars of Lizzy Goodman's oral history of New York's post-9/11 rock scene, 'Meet Me In The Bathroom.' Or, for God's sake, Jeff Chang's history of hip-hop, 'Can't Stop Won't Stop.' But to explain this era to someone who hasn't devoted their psyche or youth to 'indie rock,' you'd need to spend a whole dinner, and maybe a few drinks afterwards, justifying why the tentpole events that 'Us v. Them' returns to multiple times in its 300-page run mean anything.
Sex Pistols Featuring Frank Carter have announced a Fall 2026 North American tour that will make up for an outing postponed last year due to guitarist Steve Jones' broken wrist. The tour kicks off September 11th in Dallas, and runs through an October 18th show in Los Angeles.
I was too embarrassed to sing in my apartment, he says on a video call. But my roommate at the time was dating the preacher's daughter, and had keys to the church across the street. In the dead of night, the madcap bassist and singer took his recording equipment to the empty church, set up on the podium, and first sang his anti-war song Too Many Puppies.
burdened by loneliness, depression, and the incessant needs of others, pours herself a stiff drink and steps up to the noose she's hung from the rafters of her airy farmhouse. Then the phone rings: her ungrateful brother, making demands. She tries again-another ring, another request, this time from a friend. She plays the piano, doesn't she? Will she join a group of fellow-amateurs for a charity gig? Twice thwarted, Beth sighs, says yes, and gets on with the business of living.
My driving belief is that we need to be able to communicate, to touch humanity, to try to connect to each other in some way, but I'm also not trying to forgive or underplay the extremities. There was fighting either between different factions or just for fun. Initially, what I saw was deeply shocking. When you're in those environments, it's so venomous and hateful.
There's a lot of stuff these days I don't understand about punk myself. It became a very broad church, a long way from the Sex Pistols to the Talking Heads and from The Slits to the Dolly Mixture or something like that, musically. But also a lot of punks got the wrong end of the stick, and maybe some progenitors of it did as well.
The category's been going around social media for a bit, but there's even a domain exclusively for Cigarette Mom Rock. There, the meaning of the genre is described as a "feminine counterpart to 'divorced dad rock,'" but is also meant to conjure up images of your own hard-working '90s mom, driving you to baseball practice with the windows down and a cigarette in one hand.
The new album Everything Must Go arrives on April 24 via Bad Time Records and Community Records, and first single 'Free Dom' is out now. It finds Bad Operation doing what they do best, fusing 2 Tone's influence with fresh, urgent new ideas and coming out with something danceable, catchy, and powerful.
The Baltimore band's rendition of 'I Wanna Be Adored' is a clean combination of their dreamiest impulses and their rock-forward energy. Taking the tempo up just a tad from the original, Turnstile bring a touch of restlessness to the cover; frontman Brendan Yates powers through his vocal performance with passion, nailing a few arching belts as the band plays behind him with poise.
There isn't one songwriter, and so the flavour of the band is always going to change, says Dave Vanian, reflecting on 50 years of the group of which he has been the sole constant member, the Damned. Captain Sensible is a great fan of syrupy pop music and prog and glam rock. So his writing is very poppy, melodic and quite wonderful.
"When I read the fine print, it was 'an experience with REO Speedwagon's music.' It's none of the original members," Fletcher recalls. "I don't want to promote the show unless it's the real thing. I don't know why you would want to see that. It's just a cover band. To me, that's a little bit strange." He adds, with a sigh, "If there are no original members, who cares?"
But mainly, it's the result of the New Orleans duo's unique stamp on the sound of underground punk: Honeywell, often in a leather vest, howls with a pack-a-day voice over racing, lo-fi guitar, while RJ Santos, always sporting a dapper suit and tie, plays pedal steel. It's garage punk with an old-school country twang; as their personality seeps through the sound like dye, it takes on the color of music's sepia-toned past and technicolor present.
It only takes 33 seconds for Jason Williamson to drop an F-bomb on "The Good Life," the first track from The Demise of Planet X, Sleaford Mods' first record in three years. This latest record, released January 16, isn't much of a departure from the duo's signature sound: Williamson furiously yelping and rapping over Andrew Fearn's driving electronic beats. For a group that has always trafficked in anger, a world unraveling into chaos is perfect fodder for a Sleaford Mods record.
Emo started in the 1980s and really came to be a widespread genre throughout the 1990s, but emo's massive breakthrough moment came in 2001, with a series of albums that would take the genre out of the underground and onto television screens, radio stations, festival lineups, Myspace top 8s and Hot Topics all across America and beyond. Like when grunge broke into the mainstream a decade earlier, it was the culmination of a sound that had been building for over a decade,
Michigan screamo band Youth Novel returned from hiatus with their excellent self-titled album in 2021, but then members turned their focus towards Heavenly Blue (now known as Heaven's Blinding Hue), who released their debut album We Have the Answer in 2024. But now, Youth Novel are back once again with their new album I Went Through This Experience Smiling. Picking right up where the band left off, it's an intense listen, as pulverizingly heavy as it is deeply beautiful.