Back catalogue: Punk/Hardcore

Review: Big guitars playing huge hooks at a propellant pace. The Goods deliver their debut EP, which looks to decades worth of garage rock and pop punk heritage for influence, while ensuring the finished tracks are every bit theirs. Retro revivalism this isn't, a veteran singer-songwriter known for sharp lines drafting seasoned talent from his local music scene in order to make something new, this most definitely is. Headed up by Rob Good, a well-known figure in the underground Oakland guitar scene, California, for the three tracks here - and this project - he's called upon rhythm section and human drum machine Paul Wiseman and highly respected session bassist Cherron Arena. The result is an EP that's personal and passionate, and incredibly thoughtful, while also compelling and high octane. A refreshing indie whirlwind.

Review: Where do we start here? The band is called GBH, otherwise known as Charged GBH, the label Puke & Vomit, and the album City Baby Attacked By Rats. Suffice to say, if you're after blissful ambient or contemporary classical best jog on and look elsewhere, because, friend, this ain't that. In comparison, this is breakneck hardcore punk with early heavy metal touches that stops for nobody and nothing. With track names like 'Slut', 'Maniac', 'Sick Boy' and 'War Dogs', you can probably imagine how thick and fast the chords, riffs and drum rolls come, with the raw energy, rage and wit that has always made punk so damned vital here in full effect and more than a hint of early Motorhead to the pacing and lyrical flow, which should tell you everything there is to know.

Review: Probably mainly due to the latter day punk rock caricature antics of Billy Idol, Generation X's role in the revolution that overtook music in the late 70s is often overlooked. As members of The Bromley Contingent - a group of early adopters of the Sex Pistols - they rubbed shoulders with Siouxsie Sioux, Sid Vicious and others, but by 1978 they'd released this breathtakingly exciting debut album packed with three minute wonders like 'Kleenex' and 'One Hundred Punks', big on distorted power chords and velocity and low on musical showing off. Ironically, given their roots, this owes much more to the Pistols' northern rivals Buzzcocks than Rotten and co themselves, but that's no bad thing.

Review: Japanese industrial noise duo The Grogerigegege are something of an urban legend within the underground music scene. Apparently meeting at a sex club where a shared appreciation for envelope pushing sex acts, punishing aural sonics and a bizarre avant-garde perspective on art would lock them together for ensuing decades of musical mayhem. Known for incorporating nudity, violence, broken glass and hoovers into their live set, the pair would even take a lengthy respite while one of the members simply disappeared for years on end before reconnecting with his counterpart. As If It Had Always Been Determined Since This Day Was Born transports listeners back to the pair's earliest forays into calculated extremity with blown out, overdriven remixes taken directly from the master tapes of their first 7" single released back in 1988. This includes the long sought after remaster of 'Mistress' originally used in the legendary Enoshima Beach Flexi Burning Live (which the pair opted to burn all original pressings of rather than make readily available). You do have to remember these are the same lads who sold dried out octopus tentacles in cassette cases during one tour as a limited release, and smashed up the master recording of another work and put the broken pieces in a metallic box that the listener shook to hear the album, hence the title You Are The Music Maker. If the utter lunacy of The Grogerigegege isn't detailed enough here, well this pressing comes complete with 5500 word essay-style liner notes penned by 55 year old Gero himself (Juntaro Yamanouchi).

Review: Offering fuzzy grunge-pop with doses of shimmering synths and emo angst, Ned Russin co-fronted Title Fight before halting in 2018, after which he began playing music as Glitterer. Now a full band, Glitterer returns with Rationale, combining 90s grunge, capital-R riffs a la The Stooges and a keyboard lead motif that gives self-deprecating melodrama. After relying more on synths for the entirely solo, home-recorded Glitterer LP in 2017, Russin involved collaborators on the crunchier Looking Through the Shades in 2019, and this trend heard him move towards driving indie rock grit with 90s influences, continued on 2021's Life Is Not a Lesson and now Rationale. Russin has a unique voice to boot, not instinctively a shoegazey spectre, instead more of a belting tenor, but this proves a beautiful combination.

Review: Long-serving LA pop-punkers Goldfinger never sounded stronger than on this 2008 album, which came 12 years after their debut. It came before an extended hiatus for the band, which finally came to a head with 2017's The Knife and 2020's Never Look Back. While it never got a vinyl release back in the day, now Hello Destiny gets the deluxe treatment, presented in a gatefold sleeve and pressed up on gold wax, sure to get all pop-punk lifers in a lather as they pogo around to the anthemic sound of songs like 'One More Time' and 'War'.

Review: Following two whoppingly successful reissues of the US punk band's foremost albums Joyride (1984) and The Fun Just Never Ends (1985), Dr Strange now continue in the effort to retrospect the work of Government Issue, whose repertoire is at first glance hardcore, but on second listen incorporates everything from new wave to psych - especially on their later records. Such is the case on their self-titled sixth album, which does indeed err on the melodious side, while nonetheless igniting our innermost populist drives. The most curious cut of their career by far appears on this record in the form of 'Memories Past', which makes things sounds as if the band is resurfacing from a miasma of anger and into a kind of comedown or delirium; the tone is set for the album's coda, 'On The Screen', a similarly melancholic, but twangier experiment.

Review: If Dookie was packed full of raging adolescence, last summer highs and formative experiences, Insomniac, Green Day's follow up record, marked the band moving into a new life stage, sonically and lyrically. Exploring their most punk-punk sound yet, a heavier, growlier, blood, sweat and tears-ier take on the immediately arresting, riff-focused formula that first grabbed our attention.

So it stands to reason a quarter century later things still sound powerful and pleasurable. Of course the singles 'Geek Stink Breath', 'Stuck With Me', 'Brain Stew/Jaded' and 'Walking Construction' will be more than familiar even to those who have only heard the band in passing. But the record is packed full of depth and quality elsewhere it arguably far exceeds its older, more widely remembered sibling.

Review: It's 1997 and Green Day have just unveiled Nimrod, their fifth studio album, with the clear intention of trying different ideas, en masse. Rather than specifically looking to release an album per se, the band convinced Reprise Records to let them loose on what's effectively a series of singles. Lacking the coherency of a full record, the fact it still bagged universally positive reviews - with many rightly pointing to its rousing and invigorating qualities (surely a product of its shape-shifting nature) - is testament to the band's deft abilities.

It certainly showed off the outfit's ability to craft these huge, memorable hook lines and melodies, the sort of tracks that you instantly feel you know, even on first listen. Veering between folk, punk, ska and skate rock, what's here may not have had quite the same impact as Dookie, but many ways this is a more convincing argument for their legendary status.

Review: Celebrating its 30-year anniversary with a monolithic deluxe edition, Green Day's Dookie has gone on to become one of the cornerstones of pop-punk, pre-dating Blink-182 with its global expansion. Spawning timeless anthems such as 'Basket Case', 'Longview' and pop smash hit 'When I Come Around'; the album signalled the artistic prowess and bright future the band have continued to live up to in the decades since. Complete with 17 previously unreleased demos, studio outtakes and both their Woodstock 1994 and unreleased Barcelona 1994 live performances, as well as a 36-page book cataloguing the creative journey of these formative years, this 6xLP beast is not for the faint of heart but for the devout and avid legions of generation spanning followers the trio still continue to amass to this day.

Review: If you want to talk about landmark albums, how about Dookie? The third LP from a then-fresh faced but already-jaded Green Day represented a true 'moment' in the development of skate rock and punk, pre-empting the rise of pop punk. Casting a mind back to 1993, when the record hit, and memories prevail of record walls lined with t-shirts sporting the iconic artwork, and a sense that the future of guitar music would be anything but the overblown stadium mega rock that dominated much of the 1980s. Perhaps that never quite became the truth - Green Day catapulted this sound to the top of main stage festival bills in just a few years - but the raw energy, voice of generation X attitude still hits today. We could try and namecheck the highlights, but ultimately, from 'Burnout' to 'All By Myself', Dookie is the largely upbeat driving force of a very special time.

Review: Saviours is the forthcoming fourteenth studio album by all-American punks Green Day, recorded between London and LA and in the words of Billie Joe Armstrong himself, an intensely political one, covering "power pop, punk, rock, indie triumph, disease, war, inequality, influencers, yoga retreats, alt right, dating apps, masks, MENTAL HEALTH, climate change, oligarchs, social media division, free weed, fentanyl, fragility..." In other words, and in true Green Day fashion, this one'll be an all-out lampooning of the American Dream, in all its late-stage inauthenticity, failure, and inability to prevent its own collapsing-in-on-itself.

Review: Following on from their acclaimed headline set at Las Vegas' When We Were Young Festival, and continuing the highlight reel of returning pop-punk acts to the fray with new albums from both Paramore and Blink-182 already arriving this year, Green Day have opted to not be outdone by announcing their highly anticipated follow up to 2020's garage-rock leaning Father Of All Motherfuckers. Due to ring in 2024 with nihilistic yet anthemic abandon, Saviors promises to reinstill much of the trio's classic punk formula whilst taking their homeland to task for its egregious and abundant number of modern-day errors. Where once Billie Joe protested against being classed as an American Idiot, we've finally reached the stage where, as the lead single so aptly puts it, 'The American Dream Is Killing Me'. Recorded between London and Los Angeles with acclaimed producer Rob Cavallo, the band's fourteenth full-length seems poised to re-start the Green Day spin-doctor decimator machine all over again.

Review: Last year saw pop-punk legends Green Day headline the second instalment of the When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas, following the latest resurgence of the scene and acclaimed new albums and tours from the likes of Blink-182 and Paramore. Not to be outdone (or more likely just sheer timing coincidence) the band are set to unveil their own "comeback" LP in the form of their follow up to the retro garage-pop collection Father Of All Motherfuckers which landed back in 2020. Simply titled Saviors, and promising to sonically and lyrically touch upon "power pop, punk, rock, indie triumph, disease, war, inequality, influencers, yoga retreats, alt right, dating apps, masks, MENTAL HEALTH, climate change, oligarchs, social media division, free weed, fentanyl, fragility", with a lead single boasting the mouthful 'The American Dream Is Killing Me', and Billie Joe's recent updating of the lyrics to 'American Idiot' to now denounce being part of a "MAGA agenda", it appears Mr. Armstrong and co. have some major pieces of mind to share with their avid followers and the unwashed masses at large.

Review: Much more than just a solo indie project by an alt-music darling (though it does fall under that bracket), Priests' former punk frontgirl Katie Alice Greer presents her first full-length solo LP, 'Barbarism', following a slew of EPs detailing her crazed new electronic sound. An interesting sonic take on the absence of culture or civilization, the LP is a rapturous, entirely unique bridge between indie, art and noise rock, and is packed with rippling nuances and details that make Greer's voice sound quite literally drowned. A strange, dreamy and breathtaking take on a sound that Greer's built up over years.