Fighting with the Undertow – October update

A monthly playlist of new punk rock, alt rock and indie music tracks

This update includes The Cure, Bon Iver, Manic Street Preachers, The Horrors, Yannis & The Yaw, and more.

Welcome to Fire Red Sky’s latest playlist of the 20 best punk rock, alt rock and indie music track to be released in the last month.

Fighting with the Undertow, a line from the same Bob Mould song that provided the name Fire Red Sky, is updated in the first week (or so) of each month. The playlist aims to help me (and hopefully you too) wade through the deluge of new music and maybe hook our next favourite band or album.

I update the Spotify playlist in the first week of the month with 20 new tracks and try to include each band/artist just once per year to challenge myself to keep seeking out new music.

Here’s some highlights from October’s Fighting with the Undertow:

Promising their bleakest album to date, after 25 years or so of redefining bleak music through landmark albums like Pornography and Disintegration, The Cure's first album in 16 years will soon see the light of day and 'Alone' is its first single. It's a brooding almost seven-minute epic in the mould of Disintegration's Plainsong. A full 3 minutes and 20 seconds before the first vocal appears, "This is the end of every song that we sing", fires burn out, ghosts are cold and afraid, birds fall out of the skies - in other words, apocalyptic beauty.

There are big chorus, big hooks, and an energetic Manic Street Preachers on 'The Decline and Fall', with its insistent and interweaving piano and guitar parts. I’ve had the band on my mind this year, ever since my post about Liverpool songs, and was disappointed not to make the Welsh band’s co-headline tour with fellow Britpop-era stars Suede when it came to London this summer, though far from disappointed to be on holiday at the time.

'Mr Blue Sky' was the reason I wanted to interview Jimmy Watkins, aka Joyce. No relation to the ELO song of the same name, it’s actually a lovely piece of indie pop positivity that Jimmy wrote as “an uplifting song about being sober”. It also features former member of The Cure Phil Thornalley on lead guitar and is good for dancing around the kitchen.

Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, indie rockers Downhall bring warm melodies to 'Sleep in the Sunroom' and, maybe for some, an alt country outlook. They aimed to pass the ‘campfire test’ writing the album it hails from, How to Begin, and 'Sleep in the Sunroom' with its energetic big-hearted chorus passes with flying colours.

Enigmatic, maximalist Detroit punk band The Armed are back, bringing everything all once on the 'New! Christianity'. The song is a hurricane of stylistic elements, among them blast beat-driven shoegaze and melodic vocal lines underpinned by screaming that coalesce into a surprisingly coherent song where beauty shines through the darkness.

Nashville’s Winona Fighter give vent to their frustrations about ‘TikTok punk’ artists and not fitting into their hometown’s non-country scene on ‘Wlbrn St Tvrn’. While it wouldn’t be a surprise to find My Chemical Romance or Paramore in their record collections, Winona Fighter’s sweary DIY approach takes them closer to their Descendents meets Dead Kennedys hopes for the track.

Fighting with the Undertow - October 2024 update

1. The Cure - Alone

2. Joyce - Mr Blue Sky

3. Downhaul - Sleep in the Sunroom

4. Yannis & The Yaw - Rain Can’t Reach Us

5. Mates of State - Somewhere

6. Bon Iver - Speyside

7. Soft Kill - Blood On My Shoes

8. Emma Anderson - Willow and Mallow

9. Fomo - Don’t Use Blink-182 as a Pejorative

10. The Horrors - The Silence That Remains

11. Thirdface - Meander

12. High. - In a Hole

13. Chuck Ragan - One More Shot

14. The Armed - New! Christianity

15. Manic Street Preachers - Decline & Fall

16. Winona Fighter - Wlbrn St Tvrn

17. Deary - The Drift

18. Felt - The Pull

19. Candy - Football

20. Cult Of Luna - Hannäuser / Derive

Playlist image and main image by Philipp Pilz on Unsplash