Fighting with the Undertow #1
A monthly playlist of new punk rock, alt rock and indie music tracks
January's instalment includes Green Day, Bad Nerves, Placebo, Comeback Kid, Sonic Youth, Suede and more.
Welcome to Fire Red Sky’s new playlist of 20 of the best punk rock, alt rock and indie music tracks to be released in the last month.
It’s the first of some new additions to the newsletter this year that will, for now, remain free to all subscribers - joining the regular Tuesday issues, which will always be open-to-all.
Fighting with the Undertow, a line from the same Bob Mould song as ‘Fire Red Sky’, will arrive in the first weekend of the month. The playlist aims to help both you and me cut through all the new music noise and maybe help us find our next favourite band - already there are some strong contenders in January’s instalment.
In this month’s Fighting with the Undertow:
You can argue all you like how punk Green Day are, and whether they measure up to your personal yardstick for punk purity, but there can’t be many bands who can make right wing idiots in America lose their shit just by changing the words of a 20-year-old song. Plus, ‘The American Dream is Killing Me’ is an earworm that presses all the right American Idiot buttons. So what better way to kick on this first Fighting with the Undertow?
I’ve had ‘Traffic Lights’ by Brazil’s Asfixia Social on repeat with its guest vocal from D.O.A.’s Joey ‘Shithead’ Keithley, as I’ll be writing about it for Punktuation, but I still can’t quite work out what’s it’s all about. All good ska-punk fun though and of a similarly weighty heft to ‘Trouble in the Winners Circle’ by Joey’s compatriots the Canadian hardcore band Comeback Kid.
New York post-hardcore outfit Fire Man and London Oi! / hardcore band The Chisel round out the heavy end of this month’s playlist. Putting it together over the last few days I thought I didn’t have any hardcore represented, until I realised I’d been thinking of the Jesus Pierce / Zulu ‘power violence’ side of the genre.
There’s lighter fare too, with an acoustic ‘Cuffing Season’ by Laura Jane Grace, whose output I really need to spend more time with, and Mary Timony slows everything down to pedal steel pace near the end with ‘The Guest’.
But before we get there, there’s a Pixies guitar-driven grower from B O I, frenetic punk from Bad Nerves and – in Bleakness - some of the 80s alternative inspired punk rock that I keep coming across in bands like Home Front and High Vis.
Special mention should go to Sweden’s Sweet Teeth, not just because their biography mentions Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr but also because they sound like a lost Boston band familiar with Fort Apache – the studio where the Throwing Muses live broadcast comes from. By then a trio, the US band’s ‘Bea’ has some of my favourite David Narcizo drumming, but the whole thing’s great.
And hats off to Nashville’s trash pop punks Snõõper for quietly releasing a deconstructed cover of ‘For Your Love’ by The Yardbirds on New Year’s Eve.
Playlist and main image by Jason Rojas on Unsplash