Playlist: When the music is over, the memory remains

This month’s Fighting with the Undertow playlist includes Drain, Sweetie, Teenage Bottlerocket, Sufjan Stevens and Darko.

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 recently.

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.

But I’m still catching up after a hectic summer, so if the embedded Spotify playlist below doesn’t show the right playlist, you can find the one from this post here.

Here are some highlights from the latest instalment of Fighting with the Undertow:

Drain continue to channel an upbeat anger on the metallic blast of 'Nights Like These', a sub-two-minute romp that concludes with the briefest of breakdowns to announce the November arrive of their third album, and second for Epitaph, …Is Your Friend. As if to underline how much fun the hardcore trio are having right now, the song’s video enlists the band members’ dads and uncle as stunt doubles - a ploy that culminated in singer Sammy Ciaramitaro seeing his 61-year-old father (pictured above) stage dive for the first time.

Chicago ‘lipstick punks’ Sweetie also come in under two minutes but don't so much channel anger as the scuffed-up spirit of The Donnas on 'Nice Girls Don't Wear Cha Cha Heels', whose protagonist is variously cooking up dope, kicking your ass and taking a bath in the public pool. Whether it's admiration, envy or fear that drives the song's narrator is left open to interpretation as its chorus clatters by, ram-a-lama punk style.

Teenage Bottlerocket tackle feeling dead inside (and out) on the lovelorn zombie song 'Post Mortem Depression', but their pop punk sounds very much alive. If empathetic humour is a thing, and perhaps it should be, the pop punk of 'Post Mortem Depression' has it in spades.

The skeletal piano on Sufjan Stevens' 'Lake Wallowa Monster - Version 2', taken from the 10th anniversary edition of Carrie and Lowell, has a ghostly vitality with this track very much in keeping with the album’s sparse instrumentation. Recorded as part of the sessions for Stevens’ follow up to the somewhat divisive electronic experimentation of The Age of Adz, this track centres his haunting voice.

The post-hardcore of Darko's 'Canvas' is rich with additional ingredients, among them a dash of thick math rock guitar and isolated misplaced handclaps that keep you guessing about where it's going without ever being in danger of falling apart in an unfocused mess. It explains the South England five-piece’s adoption of ‘progressive punk’ to describe their sound, with this track being the first single and title track of the final instalment of their 'Chapters' series of conceptually-linked EPs.

Fighting with the Undertow - June update

1. Drain - Nights Like These

2. Higher Power - Count the Miles

3. Dropkick Murphys - Who’ll Stand With Us?

4. Sweetie - Nice Girls Don’t Wear Cha Cha Heels

5. Green Day - Fuck Off

6. Moving Targets - On the Run

7. BOI - Soon

8. Teenage Bottlerocket - Post Mortem Depression

9. Comeback Clit - Burn Out

10. MSPaint - Wildfire

11. Bane - As the World Turns

12. Sufjan Stevens - Wallowa Lake Monster (version 2)

13. Histamine - Poison II (Miracle Cure)

14. Flesh Tape - Ripoff

15. Modern Life is War - Johnny Gone

16. Darko - Canvas

17. High. - Someone You Adore

18. Penny & the Pits - Headcrusher

19. Superchunk - Is it Making You Feel Something

20. Slow Crush - Thirst

Playlist image by Maksym Sirman on Unsplash