Fighting with the Undertow #4

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

April's instalment includes NOFX, Pixies, Butthole Surfers, Soft Play, Bully and more.

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

Fighting with the Undertow, a line from the same Bob Mould song as ‘Fire Red Sky’, arrives in around the first weekend of the month. The playlist aims to help you (and me) cut through all the new music noise and maybe locate our next favourite band or album.

This month, NOFX’s long goodbye continues. The band will swing by London in June for another final gig, just a year after their last final UK shows. I couldn’t make their 2023 Hatfield gig but do have a ticket for the latest, last show – which includes the Descendents on the bill – so I’m all in favour of the low-level hypocrisy.

Ahead of that date NOFX have released ‘I’m a Rat’, a song that first appeared in two different incarnations last year – first covered by Japan’s Hi-Standard, who stuck close to its original pop-punk template, and then reworked for Fat Mike’s string concerto album.

Back when NOFX’s current last album was going to be called Everyone Else Is Insane – it’s now Half Album, making it a thematically neater continuation of Single Album and Double Album, Fat Mike told me ‘I’m a Rat’ would be the catchiest song on the release. It’s certainly not a bad start to this month’s playlist.

NOFX’s former Fat Wreck Chords labelmates Snuff also have a new album out, with Off on the Charabanc continuing their cor-blimey mod-punk and ‘Go Easy’ is one its stand-out tracks. This time around the long-running London punks mix the loud and the acoustic, with eight new tracks and seven acoustic songs rubbing shoulders on their charabanc.

Rivalling Snuff in the genre-hopping stakes are Night Gaunts, a “high energy, sing-a-long ska, reggae, punky, hip-hop” band apparently. The New Zealand outfit’s ‘They’ll Kill Us All’ wisely doesn’t dwell too long on its Celtic punk guitar refrain and even keeps its ska influence in check to produce something far more coherent than its collision of genres might suggest. Meanwhile, the UK’s Call Me Malcolm dial-up the ska, taking it in interesting new directions on ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’.

With Matador’s Butthole Surfers reissue campaign now in full swing, ‘I Hate My Job (Take One)’ is their latest release. The song, which originally appeared on 2002 compilation Humpty Dumpty LSD, is a surprisingly straight-forward (for them) acid-fried punk-blues. Personally, I just hope it will displace Gibby Haynes’ “son of a bitch, you whore” refrain, which has been living rent-free in my head since ITV’s 1993 broadcast of ‘Alcohol’ from the Reading Festival.

More up to date, there’s new skinhead hardcore from Chicago’s Conservative Military Image with ‘Guilty Until Compliant’, self-styled ‘groovy hardcore’ in the Turnstile mould in ‘Ill at Ease’ by Colorado’s Mindz Eye, and the Australian metalcore of ‘An Exit’ from Bloom.

‘Mirror Muscles’ by Soft Play, the UK band formerly known as Slaves, takes a slightly ambiguous look at the bulked-up generation of young men that judge themselves by the size of their deltoids. Manchester DIY hardcore band Incisions rail against society’s inequities on ‘Rot’ and teenage British punks Noah and the Loners transform their 1977 punk influences into something more muscular on ‘Losing My Head’.

This month’s playlist goes heavy on the punk rock, but there’s also 90s alt rock from the re-emerged Buffalo Tom, a radio session version of the Pixies’ ‘Letter to Memphis’ from their expanded Pixies at the BBC album, and the melodic indie of John Cale’s ‘How We See the Light, a song just begging to be covered by Interpol.

So, dive into the playlist for all that plus a scuffed up piano ballad from Bully, shoegaze-influenced indie rock from C Turtle, post-hardcore from Omsorg and a Treasvre track whose remix by post-metal band Holy Fawn would really like to be on the Stranger Things soundtrack.

Playlist image and main image by Pagie Page on Unsplash