the panel shirt is the best punk shirt of 2025

The Minneapolis band Panel released their debut album A Great Time to Be an Empath earlier this year, and a couple months before it landed, I got the Panel shirt with the muskie on it when they played the big see/saw party. According to the website, the version I have is printed on the Fern Color Blast variant by Comfort Colors. This is the best punk shirt of 2025.

This bad boy is in hot competition as a lounge shirt for my entire family. It’s comfortable as hell and I wear it out of the house the minute it’s clean again. When Baby Tyler Band came into Eau Claire to play Leona’s, Heather the Jerk and I were both wearing the Panel shirt. (Hers is white.) It’s a perfect “father of a toddler” shirt, a perfect “code switching at Kwik Trip or Menards” shirt, and it’s the perfect shirt to wear inside the 143-foot-long world's largest muskie sculpture at the Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame & Museum in Hayward, Wisconsin.

I have fished, but I wouldn’t call myself a fisherman. I respect the game, but don’t indulge. What I love about this shirt, beyond its comfort and colors and very cool design, is how well it represents Panel. A Great Time to Be an Empath oozes Annie Sparrows’ lived experience, and so does this shirt. It’s a replica of shirts made by her dad and worn by her family.

“In the very early ’80s, my dad was making a lot of fish prints,” Annie told me via text. “He would go fishing, paint the fish, and press them on to paper/cloth/etc. He made a series of shirts with a northern/muskie that said ‘Norsky’ on them, and hand cut a stencil to screen over the fish print. I still have the one he gave my aunt Renee (on the cover of the record with me), and I asked my friend Poohki (who did the layout for the album art as well) to digitize the design, and make it into a Panel shirt for me.”

I wore the Panel shirt into a museum full of antique fishing equipment and hundreds of photos of smiling and accomplished fishermen. Some of those photos have gradually eroded over time to become psychedelic and difficult to parse. I thought about how the Panel album radiates loss and the bottom falling out from under you. I thought about the transient nature of these fisher folks’ happy memories. 

And of course I thought about fish turning up dead on shores en masse. I thought about how our Great Lakes and waterways are under attack from corporate interests trying to build dangerous and intrusive pipelines. I thought about everybody I know who’s scouted the best fishing spots around where I live and woken up wildly early to make a memory, maybe even one enshrined in a small glossy photograph or a big gaudy plaque. In one person’s family, this kind of shit is the biggest deal.

It’s a perfect shirt.

This is an out-of-office blog from the independent punk and rock'n'roll newsletter see/saw. No new podcast this week as Nina and I are both on vacation. We’ll return to our regular programming later this week. Please subscribe!