Montana’s Minot shared new tracks on Bandcamp at regular intervals throughout 2025. Eventually compiled as the ‘And You’re Not’ album, the self proclaimed “lo-fi garage punk muffins” served up something that often sounded like buried treasure from the US garage rock scene thirty five years previously. This, of course, was a good thing.
Tag Archives: garage punk
CHEAP FIX – Soul Tune / Dead Mouth
‘Re-Animator Blues’, the first release from Texan garage punks Cheap Fix, really didn’t mess around. The two track 7” hit their potential audience with two speed driven bangers that valued an authentically raw sound. This immediately set them as an act to watch, assuming they didn’t suffer an immediate creative burnout.
CHEAP FIX – Re-Animator Blues / French Song
A new band for 2025, Austin’s Cheap Fix deliver two slabs of raw garage punk on their debut 7”. Whilst neither track attempts to break any new ground, genre wise, it’s actually clear within seconds of hitting the play button that these Texan lads mean business, and this first taste of their hard and fast sound suggests they are capable of going head to head with some of the scene’s best noise makers.
THE DRY RETCH – Straight Outta Cuba!
It’s rather common for musical artists to lighten up as the years pass, but this is to be expected with age. It’s often impossible to cling onto the anger of youth. Just ask Paul Weller or James Dean Bradfield. Even Henry Rollins sounded like a pale imitation of himself on the Rollins Band’s disappointingly lightweight swansong ‘Nice’ in 2001. There are notable exceptions, of course: the first couple of OFF! albums showcase a punk “retirement age” Keith Morris with as much fire as he had in his Black Flag days, and Slayer’s ‘Repentless’ from 2015 attacks a huge amount of energy and absolute fury, resulting in their best work for a quarter of a century. It could even rank within their top five best albums ever.
Over twenty years on from the release of their ‘Columbus Was Wrong…’ album, The Dry Retch prove to be another exception to the idea that getting older means a retreat to a safe space. ‘Straight Outta Cuba!’, released in October 2024, captures the Liverpool-based noise-makers in a savage mood, and rightly so, considering the state of the entire world at the time of its recording.
THE DANIEL JAMES GANG – Darkness Over This Town EP
On one of his social media channels, near the beginning of 2025, musician Daniel James mused how he was always busy. So busy, in fact, that he barely had time to sleep. At that time, he was a member of at least four bands – including Indonesian Junk (who’d just embarked on a hiatus) and reformed punkers Chinese Telephones.