punk this week: useless eaters, team work, daddy’s boy + 15 more
Massive works of art from Seth Sutton, jj skolnik, Lise Sutter, Ronni What, Gary Wrong, Jonah Falco, Mike Haliechuk, Bobby Cole, and an international cast of punk rockers.
Hey, it’s Punk This Week. Useless Eaters’ exceptional new album has landed. The unstoppable Chicago band Daddy’s Boy return with their first one in four years. Gary Wrong and Why Bother? are back. Team Work (SPLLIT and Maradeur) debuts. Two members of Fucked Up start a band with Bobby from Total Con. It’s all that and a bunch more records from all over the world to get very stoked about.
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Useless Eaters: Music for Clout [Total Punk]
The new Useless Eaters album is a caustic, blistering treatise on the wrong reasons to make art. Seth Sutton is the only person I want on this pulpit. From the project’s first 7” drops in the late ’00s to a recent resurgent hot streak over the past year, you see this art practice that’s shifted organically with time and age and experience, but this band has always been steadfastly DIY. There was never an attempt for algorithm-busting playlist placements, bigger stages, or any kind of vision-compromising money play. We were never going to find Seth in the gutter rock-to-landlord pipeline.
So when he’s calling out motherfuckers across the greater scene for the pose they’re trying on, every clout chaser should consider him their final boss. A line in the sand is drawn—is it expression or hustle? Sometimes at the punk house show, masks come off and we all see who’s really under there. This is bludgeoning, fuzz-soaked punk music for dancing all night at the warehouse spot. There are individual highlights: “Contrast” and “Ego Shell” and “Cochon Sauvage” are all-timers in a catalog with plenty of those. But this is a record that should be blasted loud all the way through. The samples of Southern Black voices, the dense bass-heavy palette he’s working from, the throb of dance music beneath this jagged sound—it’s the sound of Memphis and Oakland and Berlin. It’s a full circle, and honestly, it’s Seth’s masterpiece.
