Playlist: Just nod if you understand me

This month’s Fighting with the Undertow playlist includes Rise Against, Glare, Trxy!, Momma, and Røry.

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

Fighting with the Undertow, a line from the same Bob Mould song that provided the name Fire Red Sky, 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 usually update the Spotify playlist each 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 February’s instalment of Fighting with the Undertow:

First up, and it feels like there’s a lot of shoegaze or shoegaze-adjacent songs on this month’s playlist. Sure, there’s punk rock, hardcore and alt rock, but bands like Momma, Glixen, Glare, Heaven, Flesh Tape, Kills Birds and Cloakroom seem to be in the majority. One of those that stands out are Illinois power-trio Cloakroom, whose ‘Story of the Egg’, from their forthcoming Last Leg of the Human Table album, namechecks the Lemonheads and Godspeed You! Black Emperor as its waves of fx-drenched feedback move along at a similar punky clip to the Fucked Up track you’ll find on this month’s playlist.

If you read my 10 great albums from 2024, with its inclusion of The Cure and J Mascis, or saw my post about Mascis’ main outfit Dinosaur Jr with its exclusive video from one of the 2023 Where You Been shows in London (including a 12 second clip that’s been viewed over 11,000 times for some reason, #cough Kevin Shields), then adding ‘Breathe’ to this month’s playlist will come as no surprise. J strips away the washes of celestial keyboards from The Cure deep cut, a b-side to 1987’s ‘Catch’, replacing them with melodious acoustic loveliness. It stands in stark contrast to Dinosaur Jr’s version of The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’ (see my live clip), by being thoroughly remade into what could be a brand new track. As J told Uncut recently about Robert Smith’s music, “It made me feel ‘Oh yeah, this is where I’m at, this guy’s out there feeling the same thing, it comforted me’.”

Hailing from Chicago’s DIY teen scene, Horsegirl’s minimalist indie usually evokes comparisons with Beat Happening, The Raincoats and Yo La Tengo, though as the band recently told Stereogum, the Velvet Underground, Young Marble Giants and Television Personalities provided the bigger influence on the sound of their sophone album Phonetics On And On. While that roll call perfectly encapsulates the type of indie music Horsegirl play, Phonetics On And On’s lead single ‘2468’ has a ‘00s indie air about it that should make it a shoe-in for inclusion in a future Wes Anderson film, a thought that the song’s arts and crafts video does nothing to dispel.

Røry makes technicolour pop-punk that sounds like it’s aware of both Andrew WK’s hyperventilating pop metal and Muna’s flavour of indie pop, which is to say she goes hard and she goes pop. A manifesto for never giving up, ‘Sorry I’m Late’ is the emotional heart of her UK top 10 debut album Restoration and the second act it chronicles for Røry (Roxanne Emery) after getting sober and recently entering her 40s. As a hangover from her first music career as a featured artist for trance and club DJs and songwriter, Røry’s pop-punk has an EDM bounce that only enhances its hooky ability to burrow into your head.

I saw Deafheaven live for the first time two years in Islington and all the way back across London on the tube to catch our train home my friend and I were giggling at just how outrageously brilliant the band’s blackgaze melding of black metal and shoegaze had been. As far as this newsletter goes they’re probably at the heaviest end of what is covered, and ‘Magnolia’ sees the San Francisco band drop the clean vocals of Infinite Granite in favour of their normal face-melting approach where intelligible words struggle to escape from a swirling vortex of riff-heavy noise.

Fighting with the Undertow - Feb ‘25 update

1. Rise Against - Nod

2. Horsegirl - 2468

3. Museum Of Light - Blunt Force Drama

4. Momma - I Want You (Fever)

5. Fucked Up - Disabuse

6. Røry - Sorry I’m Late

7. Flesh Tape - Petey

8. Grumpy - Lonesome Ride (with Sidney Gish, Precious Human)

9. Trxy! - Realize Remix (feat. Softcult and whatsaheart)

10. Hanry - Radiance

11. J Mascis - Breathe

12. Glixen - All Tied Up

13. Combust - Everyone’s Enemy

14. Glare - Guts

15. Comeback Kid - Wake The Dead (20 Year Anniversary)

16. Cloakroom - Story of the Egg

17. Bonnie Trash - Hellmouth

18. Kills Birds - Madison

19. Heaven - The Fire You Know

20. Deafheaven - Magnolia

Playlist image and main image by James Lee on Unsplash