Fighting with the Undertow – August 2024 update

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

This update includes Sufjan Stevens, Jane's Addiction, Knocked Loose, Dinosaur Jr, The Linda Lindas, 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 around the first weekend 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.

There’s a few changes coming to Fire Red Sky in the coming month, spurred on by some holiday thinking time and the first concerns Fighting with the Undertow. What isn’t changing is that the playlist will continue to showcase my take on the best punk rock, alt rock and indie music tracks that have come out in the preceding month – a process that always seems to give me a long-list of about eight hours of music to whittle down to just 20 tracks each time with as much variety as I can collect.

So, what’s changing? I’m switching to a single playlist that I’ll update – so save this Spotify playlist and you’ll get each month’s best tracks once I get through that tricky and voluminous longlist. What you – and I – won’t get is an ever-expanding list of monthly playlists, as this was getting somewhat unwieldy.

Onto this month and, blame festival season or point the finger at summer tour tie-ins, but that’s been a ton of great music out there recently. Here’s nine tracks I wanted to highlight and the full Spotify playlist – plus the tracklist for this month – is at the bottom of this issue.

The Linda Lindas continue to evolve at a phenomenal rate, as shown by ‘All In My Head’, the latest advance tune from forthcoming album No Obligation, which is out October 11 on Epitaph. It’s a musically upbeat, lyrically downcast song, whose joyful harmonies cut through the angst of lines like “Nobody knows the pain I’m going through / I’m getting better, because that’s what I’m supposed to do”. With a sound that mashes up punk, garage rock, power pop and more, and tunes written during school breaks for the mainly young teenage band, The Linda Linda’s Go-Go’s fandom also peaks around the door of the poppy-punk ‘All In My Head’.

I’ve been meaning to check out Knocked Loose properly ever since the cover of 2019’s A Different Shade of Blue caught my eye, but the Kentucky hardcore band somehow never quite caught my ear, until now. Then a lunchtime walk around London streets found the pummelling noise of You Weren’t Go Before You’re Suppose To, on which ‘Blinding Faith’ appears, bring me peace in the way that sometimes only abrasive noise can. There’s hardcore, there’s screamo, there’s even bits of death metal in the explosive, pounding mix.

I’d have Velocity Girl’s indie rock pegged as shoegaze if it weren’t for the clarity of Sarah Shannon’s over-annunciation putting them a touch closer a US version of The Sundays. ‘Copacetic (Peel session version)’ is from the forthcoming remixed, remastered, and expanded edition of their 1993 Sub Pop album Copacetic, which is out August 16 and will arrive with an added trove of singles, outtakes, and a 1993 session recorded for Radio One’s John Peel.

Take the organ sound from The Caesars ‘Jerk It Out’, speed it up, add a fuzz rock backing track, give it urgent vocals and you’re close to Sex Mex on ‘Fucking It Up’. A solo project of Clark Gray, Sex Mex’s pop-infused noise is irrepressible on this sub-two-minute song.

One of Kim Deal’s occasional solo singles, ‘Coast’ is a distant cousin of both ‘No Aloha’ from Last Splash, her 1993 album with The Breeders, and ‘Hang On To Your Ego’, the Beach Boys song covered by her former band the Pixies, which got an official release on this year’s Pixies at the BBC, 1988-91. ‘Coast’ has swaying horns from Chicago marching band Mucca Pazza, lilting guitar from Kim’s sister and fellow Breeder Kelley and was recorded by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studio.

Dinosaur Jr have been a case study in how to creditably reform a beloved 80s/90s indie rock band ever since they got back together in 2005 and then, starting with 2007’s Beyond, began putting out records that match up to the peaks of their first run. They even set a high watermark for their album anniversary tour of Where You Been, enlisting a slew of special guests for the gigs, including My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields (front row for that London gig, thankfully I brought earplugs). On ‘Whenever You’re Ready’, their Zombie cover that’s seeing a light of day as part of a reissue of 2009’s Farm, the band pull a similar transformational trick to Hüsker Dü’s ‘Eight Miles High’, but with blissed out fuzz taking the place of rage.

Fighting with the Undertow - August 2024 update

1. The Linda Lindas – All In My Head

2. Ok Cowgirl – Larry David

3. Redshift – The Great Wall

4. Parker Woodland – Makeup

5. Sex Mex – Fucking It Up

6. Public Service Broadcasting – Electra

7. Sufjan Stevens – Waste of What Your Kids Won’t Have

8. Knocked Loose – Blinding Faith

9. Velocity Girl – Copacetic (Peel session version)

10. Being Dead – Firefighters

11. Show Me The Body – It Burns

12. Slumped – Trippin’

13. Dinosaur Jr – Whenever You’re Ready

14. Sphere – Qualia

15. Jane’s Addiction – Imminent Redemption

16. Man/Woman/Chainsaw – Ode To Clio

17. Galaxie 500 – I Wanna Live

18. Kim Deal – Coast

19. Touché Amoré – Nobody’s

20. Colin Stetson – The Six

Playlist image and main image by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash