The World

There’s been a rash of post-punk creeping up from the gutters these days of the elastic joy ride variety. Jumping off the fertile ground that bands like ESG, Delta 5, A Certain Ratio, Maximum Joy and Au Pairs covered, the new crop has found their way to all the sandblasted bare, jitter-pop, rubber bass touchstones that made the original few so incredibly vital. What most have lacked though is the full commitment to the ’70s mantra and Downtown aesthetic. They found the grit but needed that something extra to push the paradigm to its furthest reaches. In a word, they lacked sax, and more often the paranoia a good squall could induce. The World bring both crashing down on listeners in nail biting giddy rushes that can’t elicit anything but jerking dance motions and flop sweat.

The World’s cheekily named First World Record instantly positions them among a cache of records that push punk towards new heights, absorb the anxious energy of an age and spit it back hard in the face of a populace that needs a good hard smack awake. The record is frantic, but never sloppy. It’s full of crushed aluminum edges that are rough hewn but not foreboding. Like the aforementioned Delta 5 and Maximum Joy before them they inject an vitality and tension into their work that’s incessantly itchy. They hold a cracked phone up as a mirror to a barren society that’s disorganized, disingenuous and quite possibly diseased. Still they do it with a sense of fun that’s positively infectious.

In an overstuffed 2017, this one feels like it could get lost, but its well worth some time between the speaks, jolting your week awake with blasts of horn-donked skronk and plenty of Zoloft-level anxious guitar jolts. This is probably the state of mind you need to be in to escape the misery of this foul year.




Support the artist. Buy it HERE.