a newsletter about punk records and the people who make those

Hey, this is Evan Minsker. I’m a journalist, critic, and editor. Previously I was the News Director at Pitchfork; these days I freelance all over the place. I live in Wisconsin and work in an office full of punk records.

For a couple years when I was at Pitchfork, I had a column called Shake Appeal. I called it a garage punk column and wrote recommendations of underground punk, garage rock, psychedelic, and hardcore records. I’d regularly get really nice feedback from people telling me what the column meant to them. (I also got a lot of feedback from punks like “lol pitchfork wrote about this what,” which was also very welcome feedback.) But yeah the column meant a lot to me, too. My job was digging around for exciting, heavy, wild rock music made by weirdos without publicists. That’s still unreal to me.

The column didn’t last because it wasn’t ever in my job description. Most of the time, I had to write it outside of work hours for no money, and it just became unsustainable. I still wrote track and album reviews with the encouragement of my friends over there, but for every record I wrote about, I was leaving dozens of others on the table.

So I’m doing a newsletter to bring back that old feeling. It’s called see/saw. As a spiritual successor to Shake Appeal, it seemed appropriate to name this thing after another song by a different artist I love and have spent a lot of time thinking about.

It’ll be two posts per week most weeks. The main thing I’ll put here are recommendations of new records: three to four blurbs each week about albums or demos or 7-inches or whatever. The good stuff. I’m planning biweekly interviews with the people who make this music and have some of those banked. There will be other stuff, too—thoughts about shows, older records, and obviously, bloggy ephemera.

For the first month doing this, everything will be free. I’ll put the weekly recommendations behind a paywall after that, but you can still read the interviews and other stuff. The paywall is there with a hopeful eye toward doing some cool shit with this in the future. Maybe it’s just there so y’all can buy me a pizza from time to time. Baby steps, though.

You can subscribe here. Back soon.