In Defense of the Genre is a column on BrooklynVegan about punk, pop punk, emo, hardcore, post-hardcore, ska-punk, and more, including and often especially the bands and albums and subgenres that weren’t always taken so seriously.
We’re halfway through the year, and June felt like an especially busy month for new music all across the board. The punk world was no exception, and I picked 10 new songs from in (and around) this world to highlight below. But first, some recent features:
* Candy name their top 10 vocalists
* Carly Cosgrove break down new LP The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty, track by track
* The Early November‘s Ace Enders breaks down their new S/T album, track by track
* Queer pop punk pioneers Pansy Division pick 14 songs that inspired their 1993 debut LP Undressed
* Growing Stone (Skylar from Taking Meds) on 9 albums that influenced Death of a Momma’s Boy
* 10 albums from 1966 that influenced Perennial‘s Art History
* June album reviews: Candy, The Story So Far, Carly Cosgrove, Foreign Hands, SECT, Porcupine, Pedro the Lion, Kerosene Heights, Growing Stone, Firewalker, Love Letter, Gasket, Annabel, and The Early November.
We’ve also got new exclusive vinyl in the BV shop, including an etched white 12″ of the new Thursday single, the upcoming Destroy Boys LP (red & gold), the upcoming Offspring LP (sapphire), The Number 12 Looks Like You’s Nuclear. Sad. Nuclear. (opaque mix cream), the new Speed LP (quad black & white), the new Gel EP (violet), the new SeeYouSpaceCowboy LP (neon pink), the upcoming Story So Far LP (orange crush & black butterfly), the new Carpool LP (clear), and more. If you haven’t done so yet, you can also pick up our exclusive Alexisonfire box set, reissues & magazine and our Glassjaw box set & book.
Head below for my picks of the 10 best songs of June that fall somewhere under the punk umbrella, in no particular order.
The Jesus Lizard – “Hide & Seek”
I did not have “The Jesus Lizard releases a new song and it rules” on my 2024 bingo card but here we are! It should go without saying that the Austin post-hardcore legends have influenced tons of bands that we constantly write about, and their first single in a whopping 26 years finds them sounding as delightfully gnarly as they ever have, and just as lively as all the younger bands that have come in their wake (like Pissed Jeans, METZ, IDLES, Gouge Away, Citizen, Chat Pile, and Couch Slut, to name seven). It has everything you want from The Jesus Lizard: David Yow’s sneering vocals, the dissonant interplay between David Wm. Sims’ thunderous basslines and Duane Denison’s fiery guitar playing, and Mac McNeilly’s gut-punch drums. They’ve got a whole new album (called Rack) coming, and here’s a quick spoiler: the whole thing is just as good as “Hide & Seek.”
High Vis – “Mob DLA”
High Vis formed out of the ashes of a few different UK hardcore bands and explored post-punk on their 2019 debut LP No Sense No Feeling and baggy/Madchester on their 2022 sophomore LP Blending, but they’re letting their punk roots shine a little more brightly on “Mob DLA,” the first taste of their confirmed-but-not-officially-announced third album. It’s a big, gritty, singalong anthem that, to make a very modern comparison, kinda sounds like the UK answer to Militarie Gun.
Chubby and the Gang – “The Bonnie Banks”
More anthemic punk from across the pond: Chubby and the Gang. Charlie Manning (aka Chubby) has left Partisan Records and joined US hardcore label Flatspot Records, and his first single for the new single is a rousing, hook-fueled punk/pub rock song about “London and just thinking things are going to be okay.” They probably aren’t, but raise a pint and forget about everything for three minutes and 19 seconds with “The Bonnie Banks.”
Combat – “Stay Golden”
“Stay Golden” is the first single/title track off Baltimore band Combat’s second album and first for Counter Intuitive, and it only takes Combat a minute and 59 seconds to make a massive leap from their 2022 debut LP Text Me When You Get Back. It’s an indie/emo/punk (and sometimes ska) rager that sounds like a cross between Bomb the Music Industry! and Prince Daddy & the Hyena, and band leader Holden Wolf’s scream-sung, soul-baring vocals are pure catharsis the whole time. There’s been plenty of good emo last year, but it’s been a minute since a new emo band completely swept me off my feet the way Combat did with “Stay Golden.”
Bottom Bracket – “Unsavory”
Here’s some more good emo, from Bottom Bracket, who hail from the Midwest emo epicenter of Chicago and who recently signed to the beloved emo label Count Your Lucky Stars. Their first single for the label is “Unsavory,” which reminds me a lot of Proper-era Into It. Over It. (aka mathy, catchy, punky Midwest emo), and they do it super well and make it sound as fresh as IIOI did in 2011.
I Love Your Lifestyle – “Plot Twist”
More good emo, also on Counter Intuitive Records but this time from Sweden. “Plot Twist” is the first single from I Love Your Lifestyle’s first album in four years, Summerland (Torpa or Nothing, and it’s intimate and scrappy but also explosive and anthemic. It’s got reckless punk abandon, twinkle riffs, tastefully off-key vocals, and a post-rocky coda with gang vocal “whoa-ohs” to seal the deal.
Sonagi – “Rain Shadow”
Ryann Slauson fronts not one but two of the best screamo bands around, Closer and Sonagi, the latter of which just announced a new EP for Touché Amoré vocalist Jeremy Bolm’s Secret Voice label (following a debut LP on Get Better Records). As much as I liked Sonagi in the past, their new single “Rain Shadow” is one of my favorite things I’ve heard from this band yet. It’s so raw that it sounds like you’re right there in the room with them (Steve Roche of Saetia and Off Minor engineered and mixed), and beneath that scratchy exterior is so much passion and beauty. The guitars go back and forth between breakdown-y chugs and post-rocky delicacy, as Ryann’s pained shouts take on grief in a way that’s as poetic as it is devastating.
Blind Girls – “Dissonance”
More screamo, this time from Australia. Blind Girls are gearing up to release their third LP An Exit Exists this week (7/5) via Persistent Vision (and speaking of Secret Voice, they have a variant of it too), and opening track/lead single “Dissonance” is 74 seconds of pure screamo fury with some Botch-like mathcore in the mix to make things even more chaotic. It’s a real headache-inducer (in the best way), and the despair in Sharni Brouwer’s piercing screams is entirely palpable.
worlds greatest dad – “Twenty Deer”
Atlanta’s worlds greatest dad call their upcoming SideOneDummy debut Better Luck Next Time “redneck emo,” so that’s good enough for me to make it eligible for this column, but lead single “Twenty Deer” mostly reminds me of stuff like Ratboys and Wednesday, who are at least adjacent to the emo community but not really emo bands. Genre pontificating aside, “Twenty Deer” is just a really great song and I think readers of this column would like it so here it is. It was written on tour when making the long drive from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh, and it embraces the timeless life-on-the-road trope, using deer on the side of the road in the Poconos as a metaphor for feeling “too overwhelmed to understand, appreciate, and actually experience what was happening around me” in the midst of a busy DIY tour. Like most great road songs, you don’t have to be a touring musician yourself to feel the emotion within, and vocalist/guitarist Maddie Duncan conveys that emotion with so much power.
The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die – “Augeries of Guilt”
Speaking of music that I’m not sure if it technically fits the genre(s) of this column, TWIABP are basically a full-on prog band now, but they started out as an emo band and they just released a faithful cover of a Ceremony song so fuck it, here’s the new six-minute prog song from TWIABP. Like TWIABP’s underrated 2017 album Always Foreign, “Augeries of Guilt” is being released into a period of political unrest, and the music is inseparable from the world around it. “It’s about the queasy feeling of rooting for a matador,” vocalist David Bello says. “The unease at the prospect of voting for a president when the lesser-of-two-evils has been enabling genocide, and the dystopia of an AI called Lavender determining its own morality of family annihilation.” That unease comes through in both the dizzying instrumentals and the unsubtle lyrics, and you can feel how intent David and his bandmates are on leaving an impact. It’s pretty wild to see how far this band has come since the Formlessness days, and it’s no small feat that, 14 years in, their next move is still unpredictable.
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In an effort to cover as many bands as possible, I try to just do one single per album cycle in these monthly roundups, so catch up on previous months’ lists for even more:
For even more new songs, listen below or subscribe to our playlist of punk/emo/hardcore/etc songs of 2024.
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Browse our selection of hand-picked punk vinyl.
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Read past and future editions of ‘In Defense of the Genre’ here.
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Top photo: The Jesus Lizard at Brooklyn Bowl on NYE 2020 by Edwina Hay. More here.