Pretty Girls Make Graves’ Good Health: The 27-Minute Album That Had Everything

Remember when you couldn’t take a CD out of your car player? Not because the stereo was broken, but because the album inside was too perfect to remove? That’s what Good Health was for a certain kind of listener in 2002. This week on Dig Me Out, we revisited the Seattle post-hardcore band that existed for just six years (2001–2007), made three albums, and left a mark that still hasn’t faded. Producer Phil Ek (Built to Spill, Modest Mouse) captured something raw but never under-produced, and Stereogum wasn’t wrong when they called it “28 delirious minutes that are enough to leave you breathless and stirred.” If you haven’t heard it since college, you owe it to yourself.

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80s Metal Poll: Demons, Thrash, & Black Crowes Connections

80s horror soundtracks, thrash experiments, and genre-defining chaos. Each one’s got a story worth telling. The question is: which one do you want to hear us tear into first?

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Know a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight?

Suggest it for a future episode.

Coming Up Next

Stevie Wright – Hard Road (Tuesday, May 5)

If the name Stevie Wright doesn’t ring a bell, here’s the entry point: he was the original lead singer of The Easybeats, the Australian band that gave the world “Friday on My Mind” in 1965. Hard Road was Wright’s 1974 solo debut, and it was produced by Harry Vanda and George Young, the songwriting duo who would go on to produce AC/DC’s early records. That pedigree alone should make your ears perk up.

This one was picked by Gavin Reid, a member of the Board of Directors. Give it a spin before Tuesday and come ready with your take.

Want to hand-pick an album and join us on the podcast to discuss it? Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com.

New Releases

Foo Fighters – Your Favorite Toy

You know Foo Fighters. Your Favorite Toy is their 12th album, out April 24, and at 36 minutes it’s the shortest thing they’ve put out. The bigger story is the drum stool: this is the first Foos record with Ilan Rubin behind the kit, following Taylor Hawkins’ death in 2022.

What works: Eli Enis at Kerrang! calls it “back to brilliant basics as Foo Fighters strip back and crank the volume on killer 12th album.”

What doesn’t: Drew Litowitz at The A.V. Club calls it “a retread of well-worn ideas advertised as a ‘return to form.’” If you wanted Foo Fighters to evolve rather than consolidate, this won’t change that.

The Toadies – The Charmer

Fort Worth’s finest, authors of “Possum Kingdom,” are back with their eighth studio album, their first in nine years. The detail that makes it worth your attention regardless of where you land on the band: The Charmer was tracked all-analog with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, one of the final projects he completed before his death in 2024.

What works: Jeremy Lukens at Glide Magazine writes that the record “stays true to the raw, aggressive roots of their early work.” The Albini influence is audible in the best way: nothing is smoothed over.

What doesn’t: Nine years is a long time, and David M. Rangel at The Indy Review frames it as “a no-frills record, devoid of studio trickery.” That stripped-down approach rewards familiarity with the band’s earlier work; coming in cold, the appeal is less immediate.

At The Gates – The Ghost of a Future Dead

The Swedish band that wrote the rulebook for melodic death metal with Slaughter of the Soul in 1995 returns with their eighth album. Vocalist Tomas Lindberg recorded his parts the day before surgery for the cancer that took his life in September 2025. This album is his last. It debuted at number one on the Swedish albums chart.

What works: Nick Ruskell at Kerrang! gave it five out of five: “Out of context, it stands tall among their best records.” Fans on r/melodicdeathmetal have treated it as a landmark moment.

What doesn’t: This is unrepentant melodic death metal: tremolo riffs, blast beats, Lindberg’s signature bark. Even sympathetic listeners can find it heavy lifting. As Andrew Rothmund at Teeth of the Divine put it, “the songs vary fairly widely in style; thus, depending on what you actually want from At The Gates, you might be put off by various sections of this album.” If the genre has never been your entry point into extreme music, the emotional story will likely land harder than the songs themselves.

If you want to hand-pick an album for a future episode and join us on the podcast to dig into it, that’s exactly what the Board of Directors is for. Join at dmounion.com.

American Football – LP4

If you know American Football, you know “Never Meant” and that 1999 self-titled debut. LP4 is their first album in nearly seven years, and Mike Kinsella has written a record about middle age, divorce, addiction, shame, suicide, and rebirth across 10 tracks and nearly 50 minutes.

What works: Sam Law at Kerrang! calls it “a huge, exploratory, horrifyingly candid” record that “may just be their best.”

What doesn’t: American Football have always asked for patience, with songs that build slowly over seven or eight minutes. As Boolin Tunes’ 9/10 review notes, the band turns “disparate personal tragedies into a collective opus that is disarming and often breathtaking,” but only if you commit. Background-listen this one and you’ll miss everything that makes it work.

Failure – Location Lost

Failure are one of those bands the people who know them feel personally responsible for. Location Lost is the LA trio’s seventh album, written by Ken Andrews while recovering from back surgery and intentionally turning off what he called his “editorial brain.” Hayley Williams of Paramore guests on “The Rising Skyline.”

What works: PsychicChris at Sputnikmusic gave it 4.5 out of 5 and called it “an especially impressive offering that may be their best since Fantastic Planet.” That’s a serious benchmark for this fanbase.

What doesn’t: Failure’s appeal is cumulative. The discussion thread at r/failure shows the split: longtime fans love it, but newer listeners often note they can’t fully connect without working back through the catalog. If Fantastic Planet isn’t already in your rotation, the “best since” framing won’t carry the same weight.

The Claypool Lennon Delirium – The Great Parrot-Ox and The Golden Egg of Empathy

Les Claypool and Sean Ono Lennon’s third record together is out May 1, seven years after South of Reality. It’s a 14-track concept album about the Paperclip Maximizer, an AI ethics thought experiment about a superintelligence that optimizes for a single goal until it consumes everything. There’s a 24-page comic book included. Claypool says it’s the most labor-intensive project of his career.

What works: Eric Harabadian at Music Connection gave it an 8 out of 10 and called it “their best yet.”

What doesn’t: The concept demands buy-in and the runtime demands patience. If Primus or Sean Lennon’s solo work has ever struck you as trying too hard, Tim Jackson at Far Out gets at the line you’ll have to cross: he calls it “a fantastical attack on AI that leans on the right side of psychedelic charm.” Whether you agree with the “right side” depends on your tolerance for the Delirium universe.

Also Out This Week

Sepultura – The Cloud of Unknowing (EP): Four songs recorded spontaneously in Miami, the final studio work from a band wrapping up a 40-year career on their “Celebrating Life Through Death” farewell tour. SonicAbuse called it a “mini-masterpiece and a very special farewell” (10/10).

Tori Amos – In Times of Dragons: Her 18th album, a 17-track concept record about escaping a sadistic billionaire Lizard Demon husband, out May 1. Spill Magazine called it outright “a masterpiece.”

Metric – Romanticize the Dive: Their 10th album, recorded at Electric Lady Studios and designed as a conscious return to the band’s early essence. AllMusic said it’s “yet another great Metric album” and a showcase for Emily Haines’ vocals after 25 years together.

The Black Keys – Peaches!: A covers album of blues tracks, recorded live with minimal overdubs in Nashville, the first they’ve self-mixed since 2006. Louder Sound heard something revitalized and unrefined; the A.V. Club was less convinced.

The Boo Radleys – In Spite of Everything: Their ninth album, out May 1, written in the shadow of real loss (the death of bassist Tim Brown’s son) and produced by Brown himself, without Martin Carr. Hotpress called it an impressive return from Britpop maestros, full of catchy hooks and gorgeous harmonies.

Seefeel – Sol.Hz: The pioneering duo’s first full-length in 15 years on Warp Records, described as their “dub album,” built on cavernous bass, processed effects, and hazy shoegaze-electronic textures. Igloo Magazine called it “ambient-adjacent music with a pulse, dub-inflected electronic music with a human touch.”

John Corabi – New Day: The ex-Motley Crue vocalist’s first full-length of original material, produced by Marti Frederiksen (Aerosmith, Ozzy) with Richard Fortus of Guns N’ Roses on guitar. Maximum Volume Music (8/10) wrote: “What you are really hearing is a songwriter with genuine mastery of the craft.”

Glen Hansard – Don’t Settle Vol. 1: Transmissions East: Recorded live over two days at Berlin’s Funkhaus studio in April 2025 on Hansard’s 55th birthday, this career retrospective draws from his work with The Frames, The Swell Season, and his solo records. Hotpress called it a “powerful and spellbinding listen” (8/10).

Doug Gillard – Parallel Stride: The Guided By Voices and Nada Surf guitarist’s fourth solo album, his first in 12 years, 11 tracks co-produced with Tom Beaujour. Louder Than War called it “a fabulously catchy new album of simpatico songs.”

Fresh in the Hopper

These are recent listener suggestions sitting in the queue, waiting for their moment.

Cherry Blossom Clinic, The Great Poptastic Splendorbomb (2002), submitted by whitsbrain. Described as “very catchy, hook-filled songs with loud guitars that just crunch and grind,” with comparisons to Redd Kross and the Blue or Maladroit stages of Weezer. The whole thing runs 30 minutes and whitsbrain says if you’re fond of harder-edged power pop, “you should certainly enjoy this.” That’s a persuasive pitch.

HSAS, Through the Fire (1984), submitted by Chip. A supergroup of Sammy Hagar, Neal Schon, Kenny Aaronson, and Michael Shrieve that, by Chip’s reasoning, should have been a much bigger deal: Hagar’s solo run was in full swing, Schon had Journey behind him. Then Hagar joined Van Halen in ‘85 and Schon went back to Journey, and the whole thing became a compelling one-and-done footnote. The counterfactual is genuinely interesting.

CIV, Thirteen Day Getaway (1998), submitted by Gavin Reid. CIV started in the hardcore scene, moved into SoCal punk, then surprised everyone on their third album by pivoting toward a 70s British rock sound: think the Faces, but with 90s loudness. According to Gavin, the pivot was met “with predictable bemusement by the public,” the album sank the band’s momentum, and they faded away so completely that they only recently showed up on streaming. That’s a classic Hopper story.

Springbok Nude Girls, Surpass the Powers (1999), submitted by Gary Kalmek. Despite what Gary admits is a terrible name, SNG became the biggest rock act in South Africa in the late 90s. Their thing: a non-ska punk band with a trumpet player who contributes meaningfully to the songwriting, each track blending different styles of rock into something cohesive. Recorded by Kevin Shirley. Gary’s description alone earns it a spot on the list.

Got a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Drop it in the Hopper.

That’s exactly what we’ve got cooking in this month’s poll—four wildly different slices of 80s rock and metal goodness that range from demonic movie soundtracks to Bay Area thrash experiments. Each one’s got a story worth telling. The question is: which one do you want to hear us tear into first?

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Black Roses (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Various Artists

Black Roses is a movie about a band of demons who come to a town to drag everyone to hell. The band is played by King Kobra, who contribute tracks like “Take It Off” to the soundtrack. But they’re joined by Lizzy Borden, Tempest, and Hallow’s Eve in what becomes a compilation of pure cheesy 80s metal goodness. This 1988 soundtrack isn’t high art—it’s the kind of gloriously ridiculous album that lives in the “so bad it’s perfect” zone. Think leather, hairspray, and supernatural mayhem condensed into one glorious slab of vinyl.

Nominated by: Keith P Miller

Museum - Mary My Hope

A weird anomaly of an alt-rock, goth rock, hard rock album. This Atlanta outfit was formed in 1987 by Clinton Steele and Sven Pipien (both formerly of The Children), along with Kentucky transplants Steve Gorman and James Vincent Hall. Drummer Steve Gorman was an early member who left to join Mr. Crowe’s Garden—which would become The Black Crowes—and bassist Sven Pipien ended up in The Black Crowes too. Their 1989 album Museum is what happens when goth rock, hard rock, and alt-rock get tossed in a blender by a band that couldn’t decide what they wanted to be. Critics called it “flawed and unfocused,” comparing it to everyone from Bauhaus to the Beatles to Pink Floyd. But tracks like “Suicide King” and “Communion” suggest there’s something genuinely compelling buried in the chaos. An anomaly? Absolutely. Nominated by: Marmaduke

Frolic Through the Park - Death Angel

A young Bay Area thrash band made up of Filipino teenagers, Death Angel’s 1988 sophomore release saw the band branching out a little bit, incorporating some punk, funk, and hard rock into their speed metal sound. They had a small bit of success with the single “Bored,” which got some airplay on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball in October 1988 and was even used in the 1990 film Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. While the album got good reviews, it’s not the favorite of the band, which is still around today. They’ve been quoted as calling this the “bastard” of their catalog, and they’ve criticized the production which was done by Davy Vain of the band Vain. Sometimes the albums artists distance themselves from are the most fascinating to dissect.

Nominated by: Chip Midnight

Welcome to Hell - Venom

From the UK but mostly eschewing the NWOBHM sounds of their youthful compatriots Iron Maiden and Saxon, Venom were immediately on their way to creating the new black metal genre on their debut release in December 1981. Since it didn’t exist yet, this was what black metal actually was before the genre became more well-defined. For that matter, death metal didn’t exist either, so their Black Sabbath-inspired demonic lyrics and their Motörhead-level breakneck speed are now revered as the impetus of several extreme metal subgenres. Critics hated them, possibly because they were not good at playing their instruments and the production is so lo-fi that the drummer sounds like he is in a closet (or a casket, if you will). However, the real reason critics struggled was because they couldn’t easily define the band—and they didn’t have the bloody guts to. This raw, unpolished slab of fury became the blueprint for extreme metal.

Nominated by: Patrick Testa

Cast Your Vote

So what’ll it be? The tongue-in-cheek horror soundtrack? The genre-confused Atlanta oddity with Black Crowes connections? The thrash experiment the band disowned? Or the primitive extreme metal blueprint that changed everything?

Drop your vote and tell us why. Which one of these deserves the full Dig Me Out treatment?

Got a Hidden Gem?

Think we missed an album that deserves this kind of treatment? Drop your nomination in the hopper and why it’s criminally overlooked. We’re always hunting for the next poll’s contenders, and the best finds come straight from you.

Suggest an Album

I had a six-disc CD changer in my car in 2002. You remember those, right? This album got stuck in there for months. Not because the changer was broken—because I couldn’t bring myself to take it out.

Good Health by Pretty Girls Make Graves was that record. Twenty-seven minutes that felt like they contained everything I’d ever loved about rock music, compressed into nine tracks that refused to waste a single second.

You probably forgot this band existed. Most people did. But man, they shouldn’t have.

“Speakers Push the Air” and the Power of the Physical

The album opens with one of the best first tracks of the entire decade. Bold statement? Maybe. But “Speakers Push the Air” does something most opening tracks don’t—it tells you exactly what’s about to happen while it’s happening.

Andrea Zollo sings about life’s complications disappearing when the music starts playing. About finding a record that opens your eyes. And while she’s delivering that message, Jay Clark’s guitar is literally doing it—these siren-like runs up the fretboard that feel less like technical exercises and more like pure excitement made audible.

But here’s the line that gets me every time: “I couldn’t put it away.”

Not “I couldn’t stop streaming it.” Put it away. That’s the CD era talking. The physical relationship with music. When you loved an album so much that even the act of ejecting it from your player felt wrong. When the only reason you’d finally swap it out was because your hand was tired from handling the case.

That guitar tone? Like controlled chaos—angular and melodic at the same time, which shouldn’t work but absolutely does.

Here’s something wild: bassist Derek Fudesco co-founded the Murder City Devils. Yeah, that Murder City Devils. He and Andrea Zollo had been playing together in bands with names like The Hookers, The Death Wish Kids, and Area 51 before landing on Pretty Girls Make Graves. The name itself comes from a Smiths song, which came from a Jack Kerouac book.

So why doesn’t this sound like Murder City Devils? Because they added Andrea’s commanding vocals, Clark’s intricate guitar work that bounces between post-punk angularity and straight-up hooks, and Nick DeWitt on drums doing things that made you remember why you fell in love with rock drumming in the first place.

This was post-At The Drive-In era rock when everything felt possible again. You know that feeling? When a genre cracks wide open and suddenly bands are grabbing every tool in the toolbox? That’s this.

When Did Drummers Get This Good?

Something happened in the early 2000s with drummers. Suddenly you’d go see a band at a small venue and the drummer would be doing things that in the 80s or 90s you’d only hear from prog bands or arena acts. Technical ability, yes—but also feel.

Nick DeWitt is the perfect example. Listen to “If You Hate Your Friends, You’re Not Alone”—he’s shifting from angular complexity to straightforward momentum, sometimes in the same measure, and it never feels like showing off. He knows exactly when to hit simple quarter notes to emphasize a groove, when to drop into halftime for drama, when to unleash a fill that makes you go “wait, what?”

The whole band does this, actually. Alternating between complexity and simplicity so your brain can process what’s happening while your body just responds to the energy. Guitar part gets wild? Rhythm section keeps it simple. Vocals get conversational? Guitars go nuts. It’s like they understood that maximalism doesn’t mean “everything all the time”—it means knowing when to deploy what.

Producer Phil Ek—who’d go on to work with Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes—captured something crucial here. This sounds raw but not under-produced. Roomy but not distant. You can crank it in your car and it sounds massive, but it never feels polished to death.

That matters because Pretty Girls Make Graves’ later albums got slicker. Not bad, just different. Good Health sounds like a band that might physically combust at any second. Like they recorded it live and then said “yeah, that’ll do.” Whether they actually did that or meticulously multitracked everything, I have no idea—but it feels like a performance.

Everything in 27 Minutes

You want 80s arena rock energy? “Speakers Push the Air” delivers. Post-punk experimentation? Check “Bring It On Golden Pond.” Gang of Four-style rhythm playing? It’s in there. Fugazi-like dueling guitars? Absolutely. At the Drive-In angularity? Of course. But also pop hooks you can actually sing.

Nine tracks. Twenty-seven minutes. No filler.

Brooklyn Vegan ranked it among 2002’s best emo and post-hardcore albums. Stereogum’s 20th anniversary piece called it “28 delirious minutes that are enough to leave you breathless and stirred.” Our community gave it 83% “the album” rating.

The Six-Year Wonder

Pretty Girls Make Graves existed from 2001 to 2007. That’s it. Six years, three albums, some seven-inch splits, done.

Nick DeWitt left in January 2007 and the band called it. Jay Clark went on to form Jaguar Love with a member of the Blood Brothers, then got replaced by a drum machine, which is honestly hilarious. Andrea Zollo played in a couple more bands, then left music entirely to become a hairstylist. She’s on Facebook being gracious to fans who still remember.

They’ve done reunion shows—When We Were Young Festival, Bumbershoot, Best Friends Forever Fest. Weekend in Vegas, play the old songs, remind people what 2002 felt like. But no new music is coming.

I know what you’re thinking: “This is just nostalgia talking.”

Maybe. But I went back and listened to Good Health for the first time in probably fifteen years, and you know what? It still rips. The technical stuff still impresses. The hooks still land. The energy still feels urgent.

This is a band that loved everything about rock music—the anthems, the noise, the precision, the chaos—and refused to pick one. For 27 minutes, they had it all. They alternated between complexity and simplicity so seamlessly that you could process the technical stuff while your body just moved.

That’s rare. That’s special. That’s worth remembering.

So here’s your homework: Go listen to “Speakers Push the Air.” Then tell me why this band wasn’t massive. Because I still don’t understand it.

Highlights

0:00 - Intro - Ghost In The Radio
0:42 - Album Introduction
2:22 - Band History & Formation
4:58 - What Works: The Maximalist Approach
12:05 - Musical Analysis: Guitar Work & Vocals
13:05 - Speakers Push the Air
18:34 - Production & Sound
24:28 - What Doesn't Work (Spoiler: Not Much)
25:08 - The Get Away
31:12 - If You Hate Your Friends, You're Not Alone
33:35 - Overall Rating & Community Response
40:02 - Outro - More Sweet Soul

If you loved this, check out these related episodes:

In On The Kill Taker by Fugazi

The post-hardcore blueprint that made bands like this possible

In/Casino/Out by At The Drive-In

The angular explosion that defined the era

The late 70s had like four different timelines running at once—punk burning down the house, art kids rebuilding it, hard rock trying to go bigger, and weirdos quietly inventing industrial in the corner.

Machine Gun Etiquette is punk evolving in real time: safety pins still in, but now there’s 60s psychedelia, horror‑movie energy, and big hooks pushing beyond the three‑chord sprint. Entertainment! is a few blocks over—art‑school punk where the cover looks like a warning label and the rhythm section yanks you around while the lyrics side‑eye capitalism.

Firing on All Six lives on the hard‑rock side street: denim, dual guitars, soaring vocals, and that hazy space between classic rock radio and the metal that’s about to crash in. And D.o.A is the shadowy lab, where Throbbing Gristle are tearing rock apart with tape machines and electronics, accidentally sketching out the blueprint for industrial and noise.

So which late‑70s timeline do we step into together—the sweaty punk club, the art‑school dancefloor, the overlooked hard‑rock back road, or the experimental bunker? Your vote decides which of these worlds we blow up into a full episode.

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The Damned – Machine Gun Etiquette (1979)

Suggested by Eric Peterson

“Everybody knows London is calling and never mind the bollocks. Here’s the Sex Pistols right behind those records is machine gun etiquette by the Damned as one of the great 70s UK punk albums

Edging away from the full throttle garage punk of Damned Damned Damned … 1979 machine gun etiquette finds the first UK punk band release a single on the first UK punk band to release an album having broken up reformed and kicking off a new moment of evolution for their sound. This was around the time that Lemmy was in the band and it’s a record and not to be missed.”

Gang of Four – Entertainment! (1979)

Suggested by Darren Leach
If Machine Gun Etiquette is punk mutating in real time, Entertainment! is punk learning to dance while reading Marx. Released in 1979, Gang of Four’s debut is a seminal post‑punk album that chops up punk, funk, reggae, and dub, then welds it into something angular, danceable, and confrontational.
Lyrically, it’s all about capitalism, war, and alienation, but it never feels like homework—more like having your worldview reprogrammed over a jagged rhythm section and scraped-raw guitar lines. If you’ve ever thought, “How did we get from The Clash to Fugazi, Rage, and beyond?” this is one of the missing links.

Lone Star – Firing on All Six (1977)

Suggested by Richard Waterman
Time for the “wait, how have I never heard this?” pick. Firing on All Six is the second album from Welsh hard rock band Lone Star, released in 1977, and it leans into a heavier, more progressive-leaning sound than their debut. With new vocalist John Sloman in place, the record pushes dual guitars to the front—big riffs, dramatic turns, and that late‑70s “is this classic rock, proto‑metal, or early prog?” blur that so many bands never quite nailed.
It charted modestly in the UK but never fully crossed generations, making it a perfect candidate for a “how did this not become a staple?” deep dive. If you love the intersection of early Queen, Thin Lizzy, and UFO, this could scratch a very specific itch.

Throbbing Gristle – D.O.A.: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle (1978)

Suggested by Ian McIvor
And then there’s the curveball. D.O.A. isn’t rock in the traditional sense so much as the sound of rock’s corpse being rearranged in a basement lab. Released in 1978, this Throbbing Gristle album is a foundational industrial record: abrasive electronics, tape experiments, unsettling atmospheres, and an almost total rejection of conventional song structure.
It’s the kind of album that makes later industrial, noise, and experimental bands possible, even if most people never actually hear it—more cited than spun, more felt in influence than remembered in tracklists. If you want an episode that leans into “what even is music anymore?” territory, this is the chaos button.

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How the Poll Works

• Pick one album from the four above.

• Drop a comment:

  • What’s your history with the record?

  • First-time listen or long-time favorite?

  • Why does it deserve a podcast episode?

We’ll tally the votes, declare a winner, and then go full deep-dive on the top pick in an upcoming episode—history, context, sonics, and why it still matters (or doesn’t) today.

And if your personal 70s hill to die on isn’t on this list? Tell us that too. Drop your dream pick for a future poll in the hopper.

Suggest an Album

You toured with Metallica. You got MTV airplay. You peaked at #92.

So how does an album just disappear for nearly 40 years?

Metal Church released The Dark in October 1986, opened for Metallica, landed a video in heavy rotation, and spent 23 weeks on the Billboard 200. By any reasonable measure, they should have been a household name. They weren’t. They still aren’t. And figuring out why is exactly the kind of question this podcast exists to answer.

Origin Story

Kurt Vanderhoof formed Metal Church in San Francisco in 1980. The band relocated to Aberdeen, Washington the following year, making them an early fixture in the Pacific Northwest heavy metal scene before anyone outside the region was paying attention. Vanderhoof has been the sole constant in the band across every lineup change, every hiatus, every comeback.

By the time vocalist David Wayne joined and completed the classic lineup, something unusual was happening: this band from the Pacific Northwest was running in the same circles as the Bay Area thrash elite. They sold 70,000 copies of their 1984 self-titled debut independently before Elektra Records came calling. Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield reportedly urged Elektra to sign them before another label could. That is the level of peer respect Metal Church commanded in 1985.

The Dark followed in 1986, recorded with engineer Terry Date at the beginning of what would become one of the most consequential production careers in heavy music. It was released the same year as Master of Puppets. That timing is a large part of the story, as is Vanderhoof stepping back from live performance entirely after the album’s release, destabilizing the band at exactly the moment they needed to build on their momentum.

The Sound

What makes The Dark worth your time in 2025 is a combination no other band was quite pulling off in 1986: the aggression of thrash, the melodic instinct of NWOBHM, and the ambition of power metal, all occupying the same record without any of them canceling the others out.

The guitar work is the album’s backbone. Vanderhoof’s riffs carry a precision that owes something to early Metallica but a melodic sensibility closer to traditional British metal. The hooks feel structural, not grafted on.

Then there’s David Wayne. His range on The Dark is a genuinely underrated performance in 80s metal. He drops into guttural lows on “Ton of Bricks” and pivots to near-Bruce Dickinson territory without showing off. The voice carries information about the song’s emotional state. That’s rarer than it sounds.

The production is Terry Date’s earliest major work, and you can hear both its strengths and its limitations. There’s a Celtic Frost-ish doom atmosphere threading through several tracks, particularly the second side, that gives the album texture beyond pure thrash velocity. The drums, though, are coated in the period-typical reverb that dates the record more than anything else. The band themselves have since described it as “woefully over-produced,” and there’s something to that: the arrangements are sophisticated, but the sonics feel like they’re fighting the music.

The Songs

Side one is almost perfect. “Ton of Bricks” opens the record at a sprint and doesn’t waste a second of its 2:55. It’s the most unambiguous Metal Church statement on the album: direct, fast, no introduction needed.

“Start the Fire” is the track that shows off the band’s range most efficiently. The guitar hook in the chorus is the kind of thing you find yourself humming two days later without knowing why. “Method to Your Madness” stretches the arrangement further, pushing past four minutes with a tempo shift and a quiet section that proves these weren’t just speed merchants.

“Watch the Children Pray” is the outlier. It’s a genuine ballad, or as close to one as 1986 thrash metal was going to produce, with a half-tempo arrangement and a melodic shading that brings Queensrÿche to mind. That’s not a complaint. It’s the moment on the record that most clearly argues Metal Church were thinking beyond the genre’s conventions.

“Burial at Sea” closes the original side one with a driving momentum that’s hypnotic. There’s a cadence in the main riff that echoes Testament, a churning quality that keeps pressing forward even when the tempo shifts.

The second side is where the album loses some of its grip. “Psycho” is the track the band themselves point to as their most definitive statement, and it has its moments, but alongside “Western Alliance” it constitutes a stretch of the album that feels more generic than anything on side one. The hooks aren’t as sharp. The urgency softens. The title track itself is genuinely haunting, a slow-building, unsettling piece that justifies its placement as the album’s centerpiece, but “Psycho” and “Western Alliance” on either side of it don’t help it land with the weight it deserves.

The Context: 1986 and Why It Got Buried

Master of Puppets came out in March 1986. The Dark came out in October 1986. There is no version of that calendar year where The Dark doesn’t get swallowed by its shadow. Metallica were ascending toward cultural dominance. Every other band in the genre was operating under the same gravitational pull.

But Master of Puppets isn’t the only explanation. There was an image problem. AllMusic reviewer Eduardo Rivadavia described Metal Church in terms that were not kind to their visual presentation, and the band’s lack of a distinctive look in an MTV era was a real liability. They looked like five people who played in a metal band. That wasn’t enough in 1986.

The Metallica connection is real and documented, though not in the way the internet has claimed. There is a persistent rumor that Lars Ulrich tried out for Vanderhoof’s predecessor band Shrapnel before forming Metallica. Vanderhoof publicly debunked that story in 2016. The actual connection is better anyway: guitarist John Marshall, who became a member of Metal Church, filled in for James Hetfield on two separate occasions when James burned himself with stage pyrotechnics. That’s a footnote that runs through both bands’ histories like a quiet thread.

The Seattle Chapter Nobody Talks About

The story of Seattle in the 1980s is almost always told as a grunge origin story. What gets compressed into a footnote is the Pacific Northwest heavy metal scene that preceded Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden by nearly a decade.

Metal Church were part of that scene alongside Queensrÿche and Sanctuary. Three very different bands, same regional ecosystem. Queensrÿche were pushing toward progressive rock territory. Sanctuary, produced by Dave Mustaine, were the most overtly aggressive. Metal Church occupied the middle ground, combining thrash velocity with the melodic instincts that would later define power metal.

Terry Date, who engineered The Dark, also engineered Sanctuary’s Refuge Denied (1988). The fact that he went on to define the sonic character of grunge-adjacent metal with Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love and Badmotorfinger, then produce Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell, is not coincidental. He learned his craft in this ecosystem.

David Wayne died on May 10, 2005, from complications following a car accident. He was 47 years old. His death forecloses any reunion that might have brought renewed attention to the classic-lineup albums. Revisiting The Dark now carries that weight: this is the best work of a vocalist who is gone, on an album that never got the audience it was reaching for.

Verdict: Listen and Decide

The Dark holds a #389 ranking in Rock Hard magazine’s 500 Greatest Rock and Metal Albums of All Time. Encyclopaedia Metallum reviewers consistently treat it as a classic of the genre. Stone Sour covered the title track, which is how a generation of listeners first heard the song. The 30th anniversary threads on Reddit still turn up new fans who are stunned they went years without encountering this record.

So here’s what the episode asks: is the second half of The Dark a forgivable flaw in an otherwise essential album, or does it undermine the whole thing? Is David Wayne’s vocal performance here the equal of anything Bruce Dickinson was doing at the same moment? And what does it tell you about how musical canons form that this band, touring with Metallica, charting on the Billboard 200, landing videos on MTV, ended up as a deep cut?

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Scene-setting and poll results context, how The Dark beat Fastway, early Pantera, and Metallica for the community vote

• 0:47: Poll Results: The Dark Wins at 47%: breakdown of the combined Patreon and Substack vote and why the margin surprised the hosts

• 6:08: Band Background: Metal Church origins in San Francisco, relocation to Aberdeen Washington, Vanderhoof as the constant creative force, the Elektra Records signing story

• 12:23: What Works: The Thrash-Meets-NWOBHM Sweet Spot: Jason’s overview of the album’s tonal range and why the combination of aggression and melody holds up

• ~13:30: Method to Your Madness: the tempo shift, the quiet section, and why this track shows the band’s range beyond pure speed

• ~15:00: Start the Fire: the chorus guitar hook and how it holds up as a melodic anchor on the record’s strongest side

• ~19:44: Watch the Children Pray: the genuine ballad argument, the half-tempo arrangement, and the Queensrÿche-adjacent shading that makes it an outlier

• ~22:00: Burial at Sea: the driving cadence, the Testament comparison, and why this track closes side one with such momentum

• ~22:30: The Dark: the title track’s haunting atmosphere and the creepy quality that justifies the album name

• ~23:00: Ton of Bricks: the case for this two-minute-fifty-five-second opener as the most efficient Metal Church statement on the record

• 29:09: Terry Date Connection: how the engineer of this record went on to shape the sound of Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love, Badmotorfinger, and Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell

• 33:14: The Lars Ulrich Rumor: Vanderhoof’s 2016 debunking of the Shrapnel audition story and the real documented Metal Church/Metallica connection through John Marshall

• 35:16: What Doesn’t Work: The Second Half Sag: Psycho, Western Alliance, the reverb-heavy drum sound, and the honest case that the album runs out of ideas before it runs out of songs

• 43:38: The Verdict: where all three hosts land on The Dark after working through every track and its context

• 49:08: Outro: Jay’s Operation Rock and Roll 1991 cassette sidebar (Metal Church, Alice in Chains, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Fishbone)

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Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

You remember how weird the 90s actually were, right?

Like, the decade didn’t just flip a switch from hair metal to grunge and call it done. There were bands doing completely different things at the same time. Power pop kids. Speed metal diehards. Melodic punk bands quietly writing arena-sized hooks in clubs that held 200 people. Alt-rock weirdos making covers records that had no business being as good as they were.

Most of them didn’t get the moment they deserved. But they got the music right. And that’s exactly what this poll is about.

Every few weeks, we open the floor to you. Four albums nominated by Dig Me Out subscribers, four very different 90s stories, and your vote decides which one we dig into on the show. No algorithm picking the winner. No editorial agenda. Just the community steering the ship, the way it’s always worked around here.

This month? We’re going deep into four records that each tell a different version of what the 90s could have been.

The Nominees

🎸 Goo Goo Dolls — Hold Me Up (1990)

Nominated by Keith P. Miller

Before “Iris” was on every movie trailer, before “Name” was soundtracking someone’s slow dance at prom, the Goo Goo Dolls were a loud, scrappy band from Buffalo that almost nobody outside of their scene had heard of.

Hold Me Up is that record. The hooks are already there. “Two Days in February” closes the album like a band leaving a breadcrumb trail to the sound they’ll perfect five years later. “A Million Miles Away” should have had a video. Should have had real label push behind it. Metal Blade just didn’t have the infrastructure that Warner Brothers would later bring to A Boy Named Goo.

The talent was always there. The machinery just hadn’t caught up yet. You know? We actually covered this one back in Episode 276 if you want a taste of what a deep dive sounds like.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

⚡ Battalion — Excessive Force (1991)

Nominated by Chuck Marshall

Picture a Michigan speed metal band that did everything right. They played tight. They played fast. They had the chops and the riffs and the attitude. The only problem? They showed up right as the industry decided speed metal wasn’t the party anymore.

Excessive Force is the sound of a band that would have been huge in 1987 dropping their best record in 1991. Grunge was moving in. Nu-metal was already being plotted in some A&R office somewhere. And Battalion was left standing at the door.

It’s a genuinely great metal record that got caught in the worst possible window. And that’s a story worth telling.

🎵 Listen on Bandcamp

🍁 The Killjoys — Starry (1994)

Nominated by Kyle Bittner

Here is a question: how does a Canadian power pop record this warm and this melodic and this immediately lovable not find a bigger audience?

Starry sounds like the kind of album that Teenage Fanclub fans would have passed around on dubbed cassettes if they had known it existed. Jangly guitars, big choruses, no pretense, total conviction. It spent decades as a CD and cassette-only release before finally getting a proper vinyl pressing. The kind of thing that survives purely on word of mouth from people who stumbled onto it and had to tell someone.

If you don’t know it, this vote might be the one that changes that.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

🔧 The Replicants — The Replicants (1995)

Nominated by Vadim Taver

Members of Failure, Tool, and a few others sat down and made an album of covers. That sentence probably sounds like a curiosity. It isn’t.

The Replicants is one of the quietly brilliant things to come out of the mid-90s alt-rock underground. These are musicians with real taste and real chops using other people’s songs to say something genuinely interesting. The originals don’t disappear. They just get refracted through a very specific lens, and what comes out the other side is something you didn’t expect. We actually spotlighted it in our One and Done episode years back, and it’s been in the conversation ever since.

Almost nobody talks about this record. That feels like a problem worth solving.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

🗳️ Cast Your Vote

🎤 Submit Your Own Nomination

We pull from listener suggestions every single round. If you’ve been sitting on an overlooked 90s rock album that deserves more than it ever got, drop it in the comments.

Tell us the album, the artist, and make the case for it in a sentence or two. What’s the 90s story it tells? Why does it belong in the conversation?

This show has always been listener-driven. 900 episodes in, and that hasn’t changed. Let’s hear what you’ve got. 🤘

Suggest an Album

If you’re a Nine Inch Nails fan, you know Trent Reznor doesn’t do anything halfway. So when Boys Noize — Berlin-based DJ and producer Alex Ridha, the guy behind remixes for Daft Punk and Depeche Mode, co-writing Lady Gaga’s Grammy-winning “Rain on Me,” and forming the duo Dog Blood with Skrillex — started opening for NIN on the 2025/26 Peel It Back Tour, it wasn’t just a typical support slot. Every night, Ridha joined Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on a B-stage for a four-song electronic detour deep into NIN’s catalog. It was unexpected, a little unhinged, and fans absolutely lost it.

That rapport didn’t come out of nowhere. Ridha had already been in Reznor and Ross’s orbit — contributing to Challengers, a full-length continuous dance remix of their Challengers film score, and lending production to the Tron: Ares OST and its companion remix record, Tron Ares: Divergence. By the time those B-stage sets became the highlight of the tour, the writing was on the wall. Nine Inch Noize — the collaborative project name hiding in plain sight — showed up on the Coachella 2026 lineup poster before anyone knew quite what it was. Now we have the album, released April 17, 2026, on Null Corporation/Interscope. And yes, Reznor’s wife and How to Destroy Angels vocalist Mariqueen Maandig adds talents to the project as well.

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A 1996 active rock radio hit with zero Spotify listeners thirty years later. Reacharound were British expats working Silverlake rehearsal spaces and playing shows with the Sex Pistols reunion, Cheap Trick, and Reverend Horton Heat, all on the strength of one single. “Big Chair” was the most-added track on modern rock radio for one week in August 1996. Then the band dissolved, the album vanished, and the story ended before most people knew it began.

Patron Darren Leeman brings this one to the table: a record he remembered only by a melody stuck in his head, which sent him on an eight-month search before he found the CD online. The result is a 43-minute genre sprint through British punk, rockabilly, power pop, and 60s mod, the kind of album that sounds like The Living End meets The Kinks with a Reverend Horton Heat detour midway through. If you respond to Super Drag or The Who at full volume, this record has something for you.

The album is not on streaming. You will need to find the CD. The discussion of why it vanished, what the album title means (it involves a British comedian who died on live television in 1984), and whether the back half holds up to the front half is all in the episode.

The Joke Americans Never Got

Here is one of the great “only-makes-sense-if-you’re-British” inside jokes ever pressed onto a major label record. Tommy Cooper was a six-foot-four Welsh prop comedian and magician who wore a red fez, performed tricks that appeared to fail (the failure was the joke), and died of a heart attack live on national television in 1984 at the age of 63. The studio audience at Her Majesty’s Theatre kept laughing as he slumped to the stage, because they assumed the collapse was part of his act. He was beloved across Britain. He was unknown in America.

When the members of Reacharound arrived in Los Angeles from the UK in the early 1990s and mentioned Tommy Cooper to Americans, they got the same blank stare every time. “Who’s Tommy Cooper?” That question, repeated back to them at enough bars and rehearsal spaces in Silverlake, became the title of their only album. The inside art of the CD depicts a stage with a curtain and a pair of shoes poking out below it, a visual eulogy that only sharpens the joke. In the pre-internet era of 1996, this title was a total void to American listeners. Walk into a record store, see a CD called Who’s Tommy Cooper, and you had nothing to go on. In the streaming era, you could Google it in five seconds and land on something genuinely poignant. The band picked the wrong decade for the bit.

The album name was the second-least commercially savvy decision they made. The first was the band name itself: a studio joke made during a rehearsal session that the drummer shouted at a Warner executive during a showcase. The rep loved it. It stuck. Frontman Matt Caisley later went on record saying he genuinely regretted it, noting that the name made the band hard to find. Their previous names, Medicine Show and The Great Unwashed, suggest a band with a cheerful gift for sabotaging their own marketability.

The Song That Should Have Launched a Career

The origin of “Big Chair” is almost too perfect. Around 1994, the band was on the verge of splitting as Medicine Show, rehearsing in a Silverlake space they could barely afford. Dusty Wakeman, best known at the time as Dwight Yoakam‘s producer, heard them through a wall. He told them not to break up. He offered to record five songs for free. The first song they tracked was a three-chord argument Caisley had written about a fight with his girlfriend. It was called “Big Chair.”

The song found its way onto college radio and then into rock programmers’ hands. In August 1996, it peaked at #22 on the Radio & Records Active Rock chart. For one week, it was the most-added track on modern rock radio, with pickups at WXRK New York, WBCN Boston, and Q101 Chicago. Cash Boxcalled the album “a stunning, fierce mix of nasty, instantly memorable rock and roll that goes from metal to rockabilly to Sex Pistols-y old time punk in one graceful, effortless swoop.”

That is a real critical response, from a real trade publication, about a record that currently has zero monthly Spotify listeners.

What makes “Big Chair” hold up is that it sounds nothing like a record that would have zero Spotify listeners. It opens with Caisley’s harmonica cutting through the mix like a switchblade, drops into a locked guitar-and-bass groove that would make The Living End jealous, and lands on a chorus so blunt and memorable that listeners were still humming it eight months after they had last heard it. That is not a hypothetical: one fan tracked down the CD online three decades later specifically because the chorus surfaced unbidden in his memory, with no band name attached. He had to work backward from a YouTube search for “Big Chair song” to find out who wrote it.

What the Record Actually Sounds Like

Who’s Tommy Cooper opens with “Big & Mean,” a bouncy, swaggering track that immediately establishes the band’s thesis: British punk energy filtered through rockabilly precision and power pop songwriting, delivered with more authority than anyone at a Trauma Records showcase in 1996 had any right to expect. The Kinks are audible. The Who are audible. The Clash surface on the harder edges. The drums, played by Adam Maples, who had previously worked with Legal Weapon and the Sea Hags before landing in Reacharound, swing exactly when the song needs swinging and lock down exactly when it needs locking.

The A-side is nearly flawless by any power-pop metric. “Big Chair” is the hit. “Nearest Bridge” turns surprisingly dark subject matter into something almost sunny, a tonal trick that should not work but does. “Hole in My Soul” is a punk freight train with the harmonica riding on top. “Then You Go” pulls the tempo down to a slow delta blues burn without losing any of the grit. “Seen It Before” is where the record tips its hand about what year it was actually built for.

“Seen It Before” is a 60s-soaked power-pop track with a Who-like stomp and an Elvis Costello melodic sensibility: the kind of song that sounds like it wandered in from 2001 by mistake. When the garage rock resurgence arrived and made Jet famous, Reacharound had already recorded the template. They were Jet before Jet. The Mooney Suzuki, who made that same 60s throwback energy fashionable in the early 2000s, essentially picked up where “Seen It Before” left off, five years after Reacharound had already put it down.

“Gene Autry,” a short whistling-driven psychobilly detour that sounds exactly like Reverend Horton Heat on a ranch, works as a midpoint palate cleanser. The back half drifts toward Southern rock on “Fools & Horses” (Black Crowes riffs planted firmly in a 1975 British hard rock context) and atmospheric delta blues on the overlong “Hand in My Pocket,” which would benefit from being half as long. Production consistency also starts to slip: “Shaking Like a Leaf” sounds live-ish, “Caught Up With Myself” sounds stripped down, and the overall sonics shift in ways that dilute the tight identity the first seven tracks built so convincingly. The B-side energy drop is real, even if the individual songs are not without merit.

What holds the whole record together despite the back-half wobble is Caisley’s voice: a rasp with just enough pitch control to land a hook, rhythmically precise in a way that ties the vocal identity across every genre pivot. The band sounds like the same band on every track, whether they are doing punk, rockabilly, or slow blues. That is harder to achieve than it sounds.

The Guitarist Who Went Somewhere Else

The most legible trace Reacharound left on music history runs through their guitarist, Ted Hutt. After the band dissolved, Hutt eventually found his way into Flogging Molly as a player, then pivoted to production, where he became one of the more respected rock producers of the 2000s and 2010s: Flogging Molly’s Drunken Lullabies, Dropkick Murphys‘ Going Out In Style, The Gaslight Anthem‘s The ‘59 Sound, multiple records by Old Crow Medicine Show. His production discography contains a Grammy winner and several Billboard top-10 debuts. His band has zero Wikipedia page and zero Spotify listeners.

The band’s collapse has a clean narrative: Interscope pushed them toward a Radiohead or U2 sound for a second album. They wrote 30 songs in a rehearsal room, seven days a week. Hutt fell in love with The Verve and tried to pull the band toward the Britpop orchestral direction. Caisley, who had built the band on “punky British invasion type of songs,” found himself recording material that, as he later said, “wasn’t me.” The label told him he didn’t mean it. He agreed. He quit the band.

No manager, no second single, label manipulation on tour expenses, a creative split at the exact wrong moment. The band lasted two years. The 30 unreleased songs have never surfaced.

Why It Vanished (And Why It Matters That You Find It)

The touring history of this band is, in retrospect, hilarious given their subsequent obscurity. They opened for the Sex Pistols reunion at Red Rocks. They went on the road with Cheap Trick. They toured with Reverend Horton Heat, who were good to them, though the Reverend’s crowd found Reacharound too poppy for their taste. They played with Korn, Fun Loving Criminals, Luscious Jackson, and the Butthole Surfers. They were everywhere in 1996, and then they were nowhere.

The album cover did not help. The font choices and color palette read as ska, not punk rockabilly, and in 1996 those were two very different market positions. There was no manager to point out that the album name was a British inside joke, the band name would create search problems before search engines existed, and the artwork looked like it came with a two-step and a horn section.

Caisley, after the band ended, worked at a restaurant for a time and felt embarrassed when patrons recognized him. He had, by his own account, felt like a failure. The music does not support that self-assessment.

The question Who’s Tommy Cooper? turns out to have a longer answer than the band intended: a British comedian who died on live television, yes, but also a record that reached #1 most-added on active rock radio and then disappeared so completely that its most comprehensive recent coverage is a podcast episode from 2026. The irony is not lost on anyone paying attention.

You can find Who’s Tommy Cooper on Discogs for a few dollars. You can stream the full album on YouTube. Whether the hosts and fans who revisited it agree it holds up as a Worthy Album, a Better EP, or something else. What do you think: is this a lost classic, a promising near-miss, or exactly the kind of album that should have broken through in 2001 instead of 1996? Leave a comment. Find the CD. And look up Tommy Cooper while you’re at it.

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Album overview and Darren Leeman’s patron pick: a record he ordered online after the chorus of ‘Big Chair’ popped into his head eight months earlier

• 1:53: Who was Tommy Cooper?: the life of British prop comedian Tommy Cooper, who died of a heart attack live on television in 1984 while the audience laughed thinking it was part of his act

• 8:32: Band history: Reacharound’s origin story: notes from a 2016 Hustle podcast interview with frontman Matt Kaisley, from near-breakup to college radio hit, the band name joke that stuck, and producer Dusty Wakeman recording their first songs for free

• 10:58: Touring, label troubles, and breakup: Reacharound toured with Sex Pistols, Cheap Trick, and Reverend Horton Heat but had no manager, only one single, and were pushed by Interscope toward a Radiohead sound that fractured the band

• 18:29: Patron comments: community members praise the album, compare it to Reverend Horton Heat and the Fireballs, and note the ska-looking album cover is misleading

• 20:16: Album overview: what works: Hosts describe the album’s core sound of English punk meets rockabilly with power pop songwriting, compared it to The Living End, The Kinks, The Who, and The Clash

• 22:22: Big Chair: The band’s college radio hit plays, a three-chord song Matt Kaisley wrote about an argument with his girlfriend

• 26:37: Seen It Before: Track 6 plays and the hosts immediately call out its 60s Who/Kinks energy and note it sounds like something the Mooney Suzuki would release five years later

• 31:14: Darren’s track-by-track breakdown: walk through all 12 tracks with notes: genre tags, influences spotted, and highlights like Imperial’s Elvis Costello vibe and Hand in My Pocket’s atmospheric slow burn

• 33:36: Gene Autry: A brief rockabilly/psychobilly track with whistling plays; Darren immediately calls out Reverend Horton Heat, and the hosts love it as a fun mid-album detour

• 35:02: B-side deep cuts: Fools & Horses and Hand in My Pocket: Discussion of the album’s Southern rock outlier Fools & Horses (Black Crowes comparisons) and the hypnotic, atmospheric Hand in My Pocket, plus debate over whether the back half loses momentum

• 40:03: What doesn’t work: the production inconsistency and energy drop on the B-side; Hand in My Pocket is too long

• 44:40: Drummer Adam Maples’ wild discography: the drummer previously played with Legal Weapon and the Sea Hags in the 80s and later recorded with Mark Lanegan, making for unexpected connections to heavier rock history

• 46:24: The verdict: All three hosts rate it Worthy Album; 75% of the Patreon community agrees, a rare unanimous verdict for an album so obscure it barely surfaces in search results

• 53:51: What if and what happened next: the album was ahead of its time and might have broken through in 2001’s garage rock moment; discussion of Matt Kaisley’s post-band life and a tangent about a completely different Milwaukee band called The Reacharounds

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Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com to pick your favorite lost album and join us on the podcast.

Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

If this hit for you, try these next

The Living End by The Living End (1998): The most direct sonic comparison the hosts make in this episode. Australian three-piece doing the same British punk-meets-rockabilly blueprint, with the same locked walking bass lines and tight two-minute-punch energy. If the A-side of Who’s Tommy Cooper landed for you, this record is the logical next listen.

The Wildhearts: P.H.U.Q. (1995): UK hard rock that pulls from the same metal, power pop, and punk intersection as Reacharound, with big sugary hooks over heavy riffs. The Wildhearts get a mention in the community comments for this episode, and the connection holds up across both records.

Superdrag: Head Trip in Every Key (1998): The retro-60s power pop angle that surfaces on “Seen It Before” and “Imperial” finds its closest equivalent in Superdrag’s approach: Kinks and Who filtered through 90s American college radio with just enough grit to keep it honest.

Patrick Testa threw The Dark into the ring, and the community backed it. So that’s our next deep dive podcast.

Maybe you wore out a dubbed Metal Church cassette in a rusted‑out Camaro. Maybe you’ve only seen the logo on old denim jackets. Maybe you clicked the name in the poll thinking, “I’ve heard of them, but never actually listened.”

Your homework

Between now and release day, treat The Dark like a little listening assignment.

• First spin: just vibe.
  Put it on front to back, no skipping, no shuffle. Let 1986 wash over you.

• Second spin: listen with a critical ear. As you listen, here are a few prompts we’ll be bringing into the episode:

  • Is The Dark a buried classic, or a fascinating almost‑there?

  • Does the cleaner major‑label sound help the songs, or sand off too much grit?

  • If you were DJ’ing an 80s metal night, which track is absolutely non‑negotiable?

  • And big picture: with songs this strong, why didn’t Metal Church break on the level of some of their peers?

You don’t have to agree with where we land. In fact, it’s more fun if you don’t.

Suggest an Album

Got a record you’re dying for us to put under the microscope?

Hit the form, make your case, and your pick might be the next one the whole community has to do homework on.

Suggest an Album

Want your album in the running? Submit a suggestion — 70s, 80s, 90s, or 00s, all eras are open. Then, become a subscriber and vote on upcoming episodes. Keep the podcast ad-free and make the next episode happen.

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Australia’s Biggest Band You’ve Never Heard Of

Here is the deal on Living in the 70s: in Australia, in 1974, this wasn’t a cult record. It was a cultural earthquake.

Released in October 1974 on Michael Gudinski’s fledgling Mushroom Records, the album got off to a quiet start before detonating early in 1975 — sitting at #1 on the Australian album charts for 16 consecutive weeks and becoming the highest-selling album by an Australian artist in the country at that time. It has since shipped over 375,000 copies, a figure that sounds modest until you factor in Australia’s population: fewer people than California, spread across a continent. Proportionally, this was a monster.

The second single, “Horror Movie,” hit #1 on the National Singles Chart in March 1975 — and it wasn’t even about horror movies. More on that in a minute. In 2010, the album was listed at #9 in 100 Best Australian Albums, and the title track ranked #72 on Triple M’s 2018 Ozzfest 100: The Most Australian Songs of All Time. The 50th anniversary reissue in 2025 only cemented its status as foundational Australian rock. And yet — virtually invisible outside its home country for fifty years.

The Band

Skyhooks had only been together for about a year when they made this record. The lineup: Greg McCainsh on bass and backing vocals, Bob “Bingo” Starkey on guitar and backing vocals, Red Simons on guitar, mandolin, and backing vocals, Freddy Strauks on drums and percussion, and Graham “Shirley” Strachan — pronounced, inexplicably, “Strawn” — on lead vocals.

Strachan was the engine. A larrikin in the truest Australian sense — wit-sharp, theatrically fearless, and possessed of a vocal tone that didn’t sound quite like any other male rock singer of the era. His post-Skyhooks careersprawled into children’s television (Shirl’s Neighborhood, 1979–83) and home renovation hosting (Our House) before he died in a self-piloted helicopter crash in August 2001. Guitarist Red Simons went in a different direction — spending decades as the resident gonger on beloved Australian variety institution Hey Hey It’s Saturday, publicly humiliating amateur performers for 28 years. These were not conventional rock band trajectories.

The album was produced by Ross Wilson, a songwriter and Australian scene fixture whose credits ranged from Daddy Cool to Mighty Kong. He gave the record a clean, punchy sound that still holds up — which makes the commercial radio ban all the more absurd.

The Sound That Blindsides You

Walk into Living in the 70s expecting pub rock and you will be disoriented within thirty seconds. This is not a guitar-forward record. It’s bass-driven, rhythmically varied, and built around Strachan’s voice rather than a lead guitar hero. The production is lean — some tones are surprisingly small and nuanced — but the energy is relentless.

What the album actually sounds like is a blender set to “eclectic.” “Whatever Happened to the Revolution” opens with a boogie swagger that anticipates the sleazier corners of late 80s hard rock — specifically the kind of Black Oak Arkansas-indebted groove that bands like Dangerous Toys would revisit a decade and a half later. “Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo)” tucks a brief Caribbean rhythm into a Melbourne street narrative. “Smut” plays like two different personalities sharing one microphone — darker, stranger, more theatrical than anything else on the record. “Reckless” drifts into cosmic cowboy territory that wouldn’t feel out of place in the Texan outback. And then there’s the title track: jaunty, almost power-pop, melody-first in a way that keeps catching you off guard.

The unifying thread is theatricality. These songs are set pieces. Characters and places, delivered by a vocalist with genuine dramatic range — one who could come across, on first listen, as a woman, or as an Australian cousin to Alice Cooper, or as a lead in a production that Rocky Horror hadn’t quite invented yet. The band performed in full face makeup and costumes, a visual provocation in 1974 Australia that landed harder than it reads today.

“Horror Movie” and the Art of the Disguised Gut Punch

The most enduring track on the record is “Horror Movie,” and it’s also the cleverest. Written by bassist Greg McCainsh, the song presents itself as a campy, glam-infused rocker — the kind of hook that lodges in your skull immediately. Then you catch the lyric: It’s a horror movie right there on my TV / Horror movie, it’s the 6:30 news.

The song is about the nightly news. The relentless parade of murders, fires, and violence packaged and delivered to Australian living rooms every evening. Social commentary dressed up as a dancefloor banger, debuted live on Countdown the very day Australian television went to color. In 1975, that juxtaposition hit differently. Six songs on the album were banned from commercial Australian radio for content deemed too risqué — songs like “You Just Like Me Because I’m Good in Bed,” “Smut,” and “Motorcycle Bitch.” The first song played on Triple J when the station relaunched to target younger listeners? “You Just Like Me Because I’m Good in Bed.” Quite the programming choice.

At some point in 1974–75, at the height of their commercial dominance, Skyhooks headlined a show. Two of the opening acts were AC/DC — then a barely-formed Melbourne band with one single to their name — and Split Ends, the New Zealand art-rock outfit that would eventually dissolve and re-emerge as Crowded House. Three radically different bands, three radically different futures, one bill. And Skyhooks was the headliner. That’s a footnote worth sitting with: the band that time forgot was, for a moment, more important than two bands that wouldn’t be forgotten.

The American rock narrative of the 70s is dominated by a small group of bands — Zeppelin, Sabbath, Aerosmith — whose shadow is so long it has, for fifty years, made the rest of the decade nearly invisible. What Living in the 70s represents is an entire parallel universe: bass-driven, theatrical, lyrically provocative rock that flourished completely outside that shadow and then, largely, never made it over the equator.

How many records like this are still waiting to be dug out?

Hear the Full Conversation

The episode covering Living in the 70s is live now. J, Tim, and Chip dig into every track — what holds up, what doesn’t, which songs deserve a spot on your playlist, and what this album says about the forgotten geography of 70s rock. Listen to the full episode.

Songs in this episode

Intro - Living in the ‘70s

15:39 - Balwyn Calling

24:40 - Whatever Happened to the Revolution

26:18 - Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo)

29:04 - Kashmir (cover by The Party Boys)

32:24 - Horror Movie

Outro - Smut

Metallica just made their first music video. “One” was on MTV, and for millions of kids who’d never heard a single riff from Kill ‘Em All, it was the beginning of everything. A whole generation of metal fans got their door kicked open by that song — by that video — by a band that some of us had already been following for years through tape trading and word of mouth and the kind of loyalty that feels personal before it goes public.

That’s one story. But there are others happening in the same decade that didn’t end the same way.

Five years earlier, a guitarist from Motörhead and a bassist from UFO made a debut record together that should have launched something huge — and then quietly didn’t. Somewhere in Texas, four guys from Arlington were putting out glam metal albums under the Pantera name that their future selves would spend decades pretending didn’t exist. And in the Pacific Northwest, a band called Metal Church was making records so heavy, so precise, so genuinely dangerous — records that bridged punk and thrash and traditional metal with real intelligence — that critics noticed, fans noticed, and then somehow the moment passed anyway.

This is what the 80s actually were.

We’ve collected four nominations from listeners — four albums that each represent a different kind of story worth telling. Your vote decides which one we dig into next. No algorithm. No editorial agenda. Just the community deciding what gets rescued, revisited, or finally reckoned with.

The Nominees

⚡ Metallica — ...And Justice for All (1988)

Nominated by Keith P. Miller

1988 was the year Metallica finally made a music video — and for a lot of fans, that was the moment everything changed.

Some of us had already been there for years, wearing out cassette copies of Kill ‘Em All and Master of Puppets, guarding the secret like it was ours alone. Then “One” hit MTV and suddenly Metallica belonged to everyone.

That’s not a complaint. That’s just what it felt like.

...And Justice for All brought the world “Harvester of Sorrow,” “Blackened,” and of course “One” — but it also brought one of the most infamous production decisions in metal history. We’re talking about a bass mix so absent, so deliberately erased, that Jason Newsted’s entire performance essentially vanished. People are still annoyed about it. Respectfully, they should be.

More importantly, this album is a crossroads. It’s the last time Metallica sounded genuinely heavy before the 90s pulled them toward stadium-sized simplicity. Was that the right call? Was this the beginning of the end — or just the end of the beginning? That’s a conversation worth having.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

🇬🇧 Fastway — Fastway (1983)

Nominated by Richard Waterman

Take “Fast” Eddie Clarke — guitarist for Motörhead. Add Pete Way — bassist for UFO. Put them in a room together in 1983 with something to prove.

What you get is a British hard rock debut that hits with more force than its current reputation deserves. Raw, bluesy, heavy — the kind of album that should have launched a dynasty but somehow didn’t.

That’s the mystery. That’s why it’s here.

Fastway existed at the exact moment where British heavy metal and American hard rock were having an argument about who owned the genre. This record falls squarely in the middle of that tension, and it never got the credit it deserved for it. If you’ve never heard it, you’re about to understand why some of us have been quietly championing this band for decades.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

🤠 Pantera — Metal Magic (1983)

Nominated by Gavin Reid

Yes, that Pantera.

Before Cowboys from Hell redefined what heavy metal could sound like. Before Dimebag Darrell became one of the most revered guitarists of his generation. There was a version of Pantera from Arlington, Texas, playing glam-influenced 80s metal with a singer named Terry Glaze, and four albums that the band has done absolutely everything in their power to make you forget exist.

None of them are on streaming. All of them are out of print. Metal Magic — their second record — has the word metal right there in the title, a cover that looks like it was designed in under an hour, and a vocalist who sounds like he wandered in from a regional wrestling broadcast. It is, to put it charitably, a historical document.

But here’s the thing. Pantera is one of the most influential metal bands of the last 40 years — the kind of band that sits in the same conversation as Metallica before them and Slipknot after. And yet four of their albums are completely buried. How does that happen? Why does that happen? And what does it tell us about how bands reinvent themselves — and how much of the past they’re allowed to erase?

That’s worth an episode.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

⚡ Metal Church — The Dark (1986)

Nominated by Patrick Testa

The debut was a wrecking ball. Pure, barely-controlled aggression — a record that expanded the boundaries of heavy metal by smashing through a few of them entirely.

So what do you do for the follow-up?

Apparently, you tighten everything up and make something even more unsettling. The Dark is more produced, more precise, and somehow more dangerous than the record that came before it. It occupies that exact bridge between traditional heavy metal and the thrash movement that was exploding in the mid-80s, and it does it with a confidence that very few bands managed at the time. “Start the Fire” and “Ton of Bricks” have earned their place in Metal Church’s permanent setlist. They hit as hard today as they did in ‘86.

And then there’s David Wayne’s voice. Somewhere between Rob Halford’s stratospheric power and something darker — uglier, scarier, more feral. Like Judas Priest if they rehearsed in a condemned building. It’s sharp and gritty and commanding, and it belongs to a moment in metal history when vocalists were still figuring out just how far they could push the register before it broke. Wayne never broke. He just leaned in harder.

This is a record that deserves more than it got.

🎵 Listen on YouTube

🗳️ Cast Your Vote

🎤 Got Your Own Nomination?

We’re always building the next round of nominations. If there’s an 80s metal album you’ve been waiting for someone to dig into — something overlooked, underrated, buried, or just unfairly forgotten — drop it in the hopper.

Tell us the album, the artist, and the one sentence that makes the case for why it belongs in the conversation.

Let’s hear it. 🤘

2006 Was the Last Year Music Felt Like a Secret

Before the algorithm told you what to hear next, a year like 2006 mattered differently. The iPhone was twelve months away. Spotify wouldn’t exist for two more years. Twitter launched that year as a curiosity. MySpace was at its peak, complete with customized profile pages, song embeds, and the genuine possibility that a scrappy British singer named Lily Allen could be discovered on a social network and find an audience before a label even knew her name. Music lived in padded yellow envelopes from publicists, on eBay listings for import CDs, in LimeWire downloads tagged badly and ripped at 128kbps. You paid attention differently when music cost you something, whether time, money, or a slow connection and a prayer you hadn’t downloaded a virus along with it.

Twenty years later, that year deserves a serious look. Not just for the hits, but for everything that happened underneath.

The World That Made the Music

You can’t understand 2006 without understanding what it felt like to consume music in 2006. Google bought YouTube that year. Pluto lost its planetary status. Steve Irwin died. The second season of Metalocalypse aired. This is context for a very specific emotional temperature: the internet was everywhere but not yet in your pocket. Streaming was not yet a concept most people used. Discovery happened through MP3 blogs, Pandora playlists, Rhapsody subscriptions, and whatever your local radio station felt like playing at 2 AM.

For music listeners of a certain sensibility, 2006 was the last year the physical format still mattered as a ritual. Many albums from that year represent the last CD a listener bought by a particular artist: after that, it was iTunes, then streaming, then an algorithm telling you what was next. There is a specific kind of attention paid to music when you have committed to it with currency or time. A lot of the albums from 2006 carry that kind of weight because people listened to them that way.

It was also, as described on the podcast, “peak music corporatism.” Major labels were still enormous. Sophomore albums arrived under crushing pressure. Disney was running the cultural table with High School Musical. The indie scene was thriving underground while the charts were increasingly divorced from what genuine music obsessives were actually hearing. The gap between what was popular and what was good was wide.

Albums That Survived

Some albums from 2006 don’t just hold up: they sound better now than they did then.

The Damnwells‘ Air Stereo is a consensus pick for an album that never left rotation. Released in August 2006, it is a melodic rock record with genuine songwriting craft at its center. Never a commercial phenomenon, but for the people who found it, the album became the kind you return to annually just to confirm it still works. It still works. Top to bottom great melodies, emotionally grounded, not a wasted track.

Butch Walker‘s The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites remains a Los Angeles album in the truest sense: a meditation on performative leisure and the gap between the city’s promise and its reality. Walker was processing his status as an Atlanta expat in Hollywood, and the album sounds like a very specific kind of beautiful exhaustion. Its themes still resonate with audiences born after it was made.

Front Line Assembly‘s Artificial Soldier brought together several key lineup configurations of the Vancouver industrial band under one roof, including the late Jeremy Inkel on his first FLA album. For listeners in a certain underground electronics ecosystem, this is one of the more complete FLA statements in their catalog.

Then there are the discoveries that caught people off guard. Band of Horses‘ Everything All the Time was released on Sub Pop in March 2006 and became critically recognized relatively quickly. “The Funeral” is one of the better-known songs from that year. But for some listeners, the album didn’t fully arrive until years later. Discovering a record like this in 2022 and realizing you missed it for sixteen years is one of the odder pleasures of the streaming era: the archive is all there, and it’s never too late.

The community added to the pile: Amy Winehouse‘s Back to Black, The Decemberists‘ The Crane Wife, TV on the Radio‘s Return to Cookie Mountain, and The Tragically Hip‘s World Container all belong in any honest accounting of 2006’s strengths.

The Overlooked

The deeper argument for 2006 as a genuinely rich year lives here, in the records that got no traction at the time and remain largely unknown twenty years later.

The Fags‘ Light ‘Em Up is the kind of album that makes you want to argue with history. A power pop and hard rock record from the Horse/Sponge orbit, every song on it sounds like it should have been a hit. There is a raspy, hooky, high-energy quality to the record that represents exactly the direction rock could have gone after the post-grunge era: more melodic, more fun, less dour. It didn’t go that direction, and Light ‘Em Up became a document of a road not taken.

Miranda Sound‘s Western Reserve, produced by J Robbins of Jawbox and Burning Airlines, is a Columbus indie rock record with a two-singer dynamic that was unusual for its moment. It toured, played South by Southwest, had a following, and still never broke beyond its regional scene.

Hybrid‘s I Choose Noise was a British electronic album that pushed into orchestral territory, blending live orchestration with electronic construction. Eclectic, textural, and genuinely cinematic, it has spent twenty years being the answer to the question “what do you mean nobody knows this record?”

Further down the rabbit hole: The Jolly Jumpers‘ Mobile Babylon from Finland, a punky bluesy roots record with a specific kind of rough charm. Swedish hip-hop artist Kords‘ debut The Garden Around the Mansion, discovered through a search for Masta Ace guest appearances. Damone‘s Out Here All Night, a power pop and hard rock record that could have easily opened for Skid Row but called itself something else. The Shys, Bell Auburn, Peaches‘ Impeach My Bush.

The sheer density of overlooked material from 2006 is one of the more compelling arguments for taking the year seriously.

The Sophomore Slump Epidemic

2006 had a villain, and it was the follow-up album.

The Killers‘ Sam’s Town is the year’s poster child for sophomore stumble. Hot Fuss was a near-perfect mainstream pop rock album. Sam’s Town sounded like a band that had started believing its own mythology: the Bruce Springsteen gestures, the arena ambitions, the creeping grandiosity. It sold well. It also alienated a lot of the people who loved the debut.

The thesis around 2006 is that so many bands had arrived in the early 2000s fully formed, with strong debuts built over years of gestation. Bands like Interpol and Arcade Fire hit the scene with records that felt complete and confident. When the label pressure arrived for record two, a lot of those bands ran out of ideas, or lost their nerve, or overcorrected toward the mainstream. The result was an unusually high concentration of disappointing second albums.

The Mars Volta‘s Amputechture went so far into abstraction that even fans of the debut’s chaotic energy found it inaccessible. Gnarls Barkley‘s St. Elsewhere offered “Crazy,” one of the year’s most recognizable singles, but few listeners bothered with the album. Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ Stadium Arcadium arrived under the shadow of a plagiarism settlement over “Dani California”’s similarity to a Tom Petty song.

The Dixie Chicks‘ Taking the Long Way is an interesting edge case: a post-backlash record made with Rick Rubin, still beloved for “Not Ready to Make Nice,” but harder to revisit in full twenty years later.

Muse, however, gets a robust defense. Black Holes and Revelations is the band’s last fully realized album, the one that successfully blended the bombastic singles (”Supermassive Black Hole”) with the album-oriented track (”Knights of Cydonia”). Everything since has been the Muse audience hoping they go back to this. They have not.

Late Discoveries and the Long Tail

Some of the most interesting 2006 conversations happen around records people missed entirely at the time.

J Dilla‘s Donuts was released on February 7, 2006, his 32nd birthday. He died three days later. The album is an instrumental hip-hop record assembled from samples, structured as an infinite loop, and regarded by many critics as one of the most influential hip-hop albums ever made. For listeners who came to it late, via streaming or recommendation, the discovery lands hard.

Cold War Kids‘ Robbers and Cowards is a more mainstream late discovery: listeners who found “Hang Me Out to Dry” years after the fact and had no idea the record was already twenty years old.

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs‘ Under the Covers Vol. 1 is all 70s covers, low-key and beautifully executed, not trying to be clever or ironic, just two people who love the originals playing them with care.

What Did 2006 Mean?

Here is the open question that the roundtable keeps circling back to: was 2006 a genuinely great year for music, or does it feel that way because of the era it occupied?

There is an argument that 2006 music is invested in differently because of when it arrived. It was the last year before portable internet changed how people listened. Buying a record or paying for a download or even ripping a CD still represented a commitment. You spent time with albums because you had chosen them. That kind of attention creates different memories than what comes from a streaming playlist.

But there is also a counter-argument: the records themselves hold up. The depth of overlooked material, the quality of what survived, the surprising range from Finnish roots rock to Danish punk-jazz to LA power pop to Canadian industrial, suggests that 2006 was a deep, wide year regardless of the nostalgia factor.

The question is worth asking in both directions. What was 2006 for you? And, twenty years on, what from that year are you still listening to?

The comment section is open. Put your 2006 record in there.

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Album format explained, transitioning from 90s to 2000s “Albums Of” series

• 00:00: Opening theme and episode intro

• 00:51: The “Albums Of” format explained, 20-year lookback on 2006

• 03:44: Where were you in 2006? Roundtable begins with Eric, Marissa, Keith, Ian, Chip

• 03:56: Eric in Minneapolis, Triple Rock Social Club, Scandinavian rock scene

• 05:15: Marissa at SUNY Purchase, British Invasion, Franz Ferdinand, Muse, early social media

• 07:00: Keith in Indianapolis, Pandora, overnight Wendy’s shift, WTTS radio

• 08:11: Ian in Canada, disposable income, record store, eBay habit

• 13:00: 2006 context: Twitter launch, Google buys YouTube, Pluto declassified, Steve Irwin dies

• 16:23: J and Tim were in a band together, deep iTunes investment

• 11:55: Reddit post read aloud: “Describe 2006 to someone who has no memory of it” (the MySpace/LimeWire poem)

• 19:33: Albums that stood the test of time: roundtable begins

• 20:23: The Damnwells, Air Stereo, Chip’s #1 of 2006 via Triple Fast Action connection

• 21:49: Front Line Assembly, Artificial Soldier, Ian’s pick

• 24:22: Butch Walker, The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites, Marissa’s pick

• 26:00: The Damnwells echoed by Keith, discovered via WTTS radio

• 27:43: Branded Women, Cities and Seas (Finland), Eric’s pick

• 28:43: The Illuminati, On Borrowed Time (Toronto, one-and-done band), Jay’s pick

• 31:10: The Tragically Hip, World Container (Bob Rock, controversial in Hip fandom), Tim’s pick

• 34:23: Patreon community picks: Amy Winehouse, Decemberists, TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Pearl Jam

• 35:16: Lily Allen discovered on MySpace; first mention of Taylor Swift debut on the podcast

• 36:39: Underappreciated and overlooked albums: roundtable begins

• 37:08: Hybrid, I Choose Noise (British electronic, orchestral), Marissa’s pick

• 38:49: Jolly Jumpers, Mobile Babylon (Finland, punky bluesy roots rock), Eric’s pick

• 39:42: Peaches, Impeach My Bush, Ian’s pick

• 40:33: Chip’s four picks: The Shys, Model Actress EP, Bell Auburn, Damone Out Here All Night

• 42:34: Kords, The Garden Around the Mansion (Swedish hip-hop), Keith’s pick

• 43:53: The Fags, Light ‘Em Up (Horse/Sponge orbit, power pop), Jay’s pick

• 46:43: Miranda Sound, Western Reserve (Columbus, J. Robbins produced), Tim’s pick

• 48:52: Patreon overlooked picks: Humanzi, Morning Runner, Destroyer’s Rubies, Sam Roberts Band

• 50:48: Albums that don’t work anymore: segment begins

• 51:13: The Killers, Sam’s Town, sophomore slump poster child

• 52:10: The sophomore slump epidemic of the 2000s discussed

• 53:12: “Peak music corporatism” named, labeled pressured follow-ups

• 53:44: Ministry, Rio Grande Blood; Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Arcadium, Tom Petty controversy

• 55:24: Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way (Rick Rubin, post-backlash)

• 56:31: Jay: Tenacious D Pick of Destiny; Mars Volta Amputechture

• 58:07: Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere: “Crazy” known, album unknown

• 59:08: Muse, Black Holes and Revelations defended as last great Muse album

• 01:03:32: Late discoveries from 2006: segment begins

• 01:03:56: Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs, Under the Covers Vol. 1, Eric’s pick

• 01:04:53: Cold War Kids, Robbers and Cowards, Keith’s pick

• 01:05:33: Ivory Wire, Nobodies (Dovetail Joint successor), Marissa’s pick

• 01:06:54: Goldfrapp, Supernature (late 2005/early 2006 NA release), Ian’s pick

• 01:08:28: Band of Horses, Everything All the Time (Chip didn’t discover until 2022-23)

• 01:09:43: J Dilla, Donuts; Getatchew Mekuria and The Ex, Moa Anbessa, Jay’s picks

• 01:11:29: Final round: anything we missed?

• 01:11:53: Ian: Tool 10,000 Days, Lacuna Coil, Gary Numan Jagged, Weird Al Straight Outta Lynwood, Depeche Mode, KMFDM, Nitzer Ebb reformed

• 01:15:17: Keith: Fratellis Costello Music, The Zutons, Pink Spiders Teenage Graffiti, Gothic Archies, G. Love

• 01:16:47: Eric: The Pipettes, Long Blondes, Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, New York Dolls, The Thermals The Body The Blood The Machine (”best punk record of the aughts”)

• 01:19:54: Chip: Veruca Salt IV (Louise Post), Warrant Born Again, Army of Anyone, Wolfmother debut, In Flames Come Clarity

• 01:23:18: J: Priestess Hello Master, The Sword Age of Winters, Iron Maiden A Matter of Life and Death, Earl Greyhound Soft Targets, Danko Jones Sleep is the Enemy, Gossip Standing in the Way of Control, The Sounds Dying to Say This to You

• 01:33:53: Tim: Prince 3121, Secret Machines Ten Silver Drops, Pretty Girls Make Graves Elan Vital, Cursive Happy Hollow, Silversun Pickups Carnavas

• 01:38:28: Outro and thanks to all guests; comment invitation

Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

L7 Had Everything Except Luck

J Dziak · March 27, 2026

L7 were as loud, as sharp, and as relevant as any band that made it out of the early-’90s alternative explosion. They just didn’t. This piece digs into why a band that belonged on every “essential grunge” list somehow got left off most of them, and what that says about who gets remembered and who gets erased.

Read full story

Josh Ritter’s The Animal Years Turns 20: The Folk Masterpiece That Never Got Its Moment

J Dziak and Tim Minneci · March 24, 2026

Twenty years ago, Josh Ritter released what should have been a landmark record. The Animal Years had everything: sweeping arrangements, lyrics that hit like short stories, and a vocalist at the absolute peak of his powers. Jay and Tim make the case for why it still matters, and why its commercial invisibility at the time is one of the great missed moments in folk-rock history.

Listen now

Heard something this week that belongs in the Dig Me Out catalog? Suggest it for a future episode.

Coming Up Next

Albums of 2006: Roundtable (March 31)

Tuesday’s episode is a roundtable, and the question on the table is simple: what were the best albums of 2006?

This one was patron-driven. Our Board of Directors helped shape the episode, and the conversation goes deep into a year that held a lot more than most people remember. Two decades of hindsight will do that. Think about your own picks before you listen. What 2006 album deserves more credit than it gets?

Board of Directors members drive episodes like this one. If you want to hand-pick an album and join us on the podcast to discuss it, join at dmounion.com.

Skyhooks – Living in the 70’s (April 7)

The community voted, and April 7 brings the podcast’s Poll Album Review for Living in the 70’s, the 1974 debut from Australian rock band Skyhooks. This is exactly the kind of deep cut the podcast was built for: a band that was enormous in Australia, nearly invisible everywhere else, wearing glam makeup and writing songs that got banned on commercial radio. If you haven’t heard it, give it a spin before the episode drops and come ready with your take.

New Releases

Flea – Honora

You know Flea. He’s the guy with the bass who looks like he’s having the time of his life while the rest of the band keeps up. But Honora, his debut solo full-length on Nonesuch Records, is not a Red Hot Chili Peppers side trip. It’s a jazz record, and a serious one.

Named after his great-great-grandmother, Honora leans into trumpet, bass, and voice across a set of six originals and four covers. The covers alone tell you everything about his ambitions: Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin Bout You,” a standard in “Willow Weep for Me,” and Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” with Nick Cave on vocals. Thom Yorke sings on “Traffic Lights.” Produced by Josh Johnson, this is Flea reconnecting with the music he loved before he was famous.

What works: Clash Magazine gave it 8/10, calling it “a captivating moment from a musician reconnecting with the very essence of why he started in the first place, and an artist still chasing new meanings in his rich age.” The Guardian nailed the tone: “Honora is never dilettantish, though: it’s sincere, exploratory and soulful.” The Line of Best Fit called it “compelling proof of musically open-eared adventurism” and “an atmospheric gem.” Metacritic sits at 74.

What doesn’t: This is mood music with genuine jazz sensibility, not a rock crossover. If you came hoping for funk-bass fireworks or anything adjacent to RHCP’s catalog, you will be lost. The album rewards patience and a taste for atmosphere over momentum. It is not background music, but it’s also not quite a front-and-center listen for someone unfamiliar with the jazz tradition Flea is drawing from.

The New Pornographers – The Former Site Of

The New Pornographers have spent 25 years being the band that indie-pop fans point to when they want to argue that melodic maximalism is an art form. The Former Site Of is their tenth studio album, arriving three years after Continue as a Guest (2023).

The recording circumstances cast a shadow over everything here. Drummer Joe Seiders was fired in 2025 following a child pornography arrest; his drum parts were re-recorded by Charley Drayton. That’s not context you can set aside, and the album’s themes of loss, displacement, and searching for beauty in darkness feel newly weighted knowing it. Core members A.C. Newman, Neko Case, John Collins, Kathryn Calder, and Todd Fancey are all present. Singles “Votive,” “Pure Sticker Shock,” “Spooky Action,” and “Ballad of the Last Payphone” have been circulating for months.

What works: BrooklynVegan landed the definitive quote: “Newman has his mojo back, and The Former Site Of is the best New Pornographers album in a decade.” Paste Magazine called it a record that “attempts to find the beauty in the darkness, the solace in the sadness, and the reasons for hope amid the evidence for despair.” Uncutscored it 8/10, with Bud Scoppa noting that the record’s background “inevitably brings an additional layer of darkness to allusively eloquent, quietly agitated songs such as ‘Pure Sticker Shock’ and ‘Votive.’” Metacritic: 79.

What doesn’t: The circumstances around the album are real and don’t disappear. Some listeners will find it difficult to separate the music from the story. And for fans hoping the band had swung back toward the pure pop sugar rush of Mass Romantic or Electric Version, this is a more restrained, inward-looking record. It rewards attention in a way that isn’t always comfortable.

Black Label Society – Engines of Demolition

Zakk Wylde has been playing guitar longer than some of his fans have been alive, and Engines of Demolition is the twelfth Black Label Society album. More significantly, it’s the first in nearly five years: the longest gap in the band’s history. Wylde spent much of that stretch on the road as part of the Pantera Celebration tour, and the album was written across 2022-2025 in whatever margins he could find.

This one carries some weight beyond the riffs. “Ozzy’s Song” is an explicit tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, the man Wylde served as guitarist for during some of rock’s most memorable decades. It’s the kind of gesture that only means something when the person writing it lived it. The current lineup is Wylde on vocals and guitar, Dario Lorina on guitar, John DeServio on bass, and Jeff Fabb on drums.

What works: Blabbermouth gave it a strong notice from Dom Lawson: “the 12th BLACK LABEL SOCIETY album is the best record to bear that name for at least a decade. Confident, cohesive and bereft of the clunky filler.” Kerrang! scored it 3/5 but praised the opener directly: “’Name In Blood’ is as complete a song as this line-up has ever produced. It’s all shaggy riffs, a commendable amount of emotion and a languorous, singable hook.” Metal Planet Music went further: “a towering achievement from a band who refuse to fade.”

What doesn’t: If you’ve never connected with the BLS formula, this is not a reinvention. It is heavy rock delivered with conviction and craft, but the template hasn’t shifted. Kerrang! lands at 3/5, which about captures the ceiling for non-fans: you’ll hear what everyone else is hearing, but you may not feel it the same way.

Want to hand-pick an album and join us on the podcast to discuss it? Join the Board of Directors at dmounion.com.

The Academy Is... – Almost There.

Remember The Academy Is...? Those Chicago pop-punk kids who showed up in 2005 on Almost Here and immediately sounded like they belonged on every emo playlist alongside Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco? They’ve been gone for 18 years, which in pop-punk years is roughly an ice age.

Almost There. is their first album since Fast Times at Barrington High (2008), produced by Snow Ellet. The title is a deliberate nod to the debut, and the current lineup is the original core: William Beckett on vocals, Mike Carden on guitar, Adam Siska on bass, and Andy Mrotek on drums. The band debuted new material on their 20th anniversary tour before announcing the album in January 2026. Lead single “2005” is about exactly what you think it’s about.

What works: New Noise Magazine called it “the best-case scenario for a reunited band. It acknowledges their past without repeating it, alluding to a much brighter future.” The Indy Review called it “an exceptional record and highly recommended on so many levels.” Silent Radio described it as “like happiness in a bottle.”

What doesn’t: If you weren’t already in the club in 2005, this is probably not your entry point. The album’s emotional power is largely tied to that specific nostalgia. Heard cold, without the context of what it meant the first time around, it’s a well-made pop-punk record. With that context, it’s something more.

Lou Gramm – Released

You know Lou Gramm from Foreigner. “I Want to Know What Love Is,” “Cold as Ice,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” The voice that made those songs work the way they did, that’s him. Gramm was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Foreigner in 2024, which made the timing of Released feel like a proper final word from one of classic rock’s most underappreciated frontmen.

The backstory here is remarkable. Released is his third solo album and first since 1989’s Long Hard Look: a gap of 37 years. But these aren’t new songs written in 2025. They were originally recorded in the 1980s, co-written with Bruce Turgon, left unfinished, and finally completed now. Guests include Vivian Campbell (guitar on “Young Love”) and Tony Franklin (bass on “Long Gone”).

What works: Get Ready to ROCK! scored it 4.5/5, with Brian McGowan writing: “Gramm’s vocals remain the high watermark that many rock vocalists aspire to, but very few reach.” MelodicRock.com called it “basically an essential release for any Lou Gramm fan. A perfect bookend for his career outside of Foreigner.”

What doesn’t: This is squarely in the ‘80s melodic rock tradition, finished and polished in that era’s production sensibility. If you need modern sonic density or anything that doesn’t sound like it was written during the Agent Provocateur sessions, you’ll clock the vintage quickly. That’s a feature for fans, not a bug. For everyone else, it may feel like a time capsule more than a statement.

Ladytron – Paradises

Ladytron have been doing their particular thing since 2000: electronic pop with cold edges and warm centers, somewhere between Kraftwerk and shoegaze and the kind of late-night dance floor where nobody is performing joy, they’re just inside it. Paradises is their eighth album and their first as a trio, after Reuben Wu’s departure in 2023 following Time’s Arrow.

Produced by Daniel Hunt and mixed by Jim Abbiss, the record leans into house and disco influences in a way that recalls the shape of Light & Magic (2002). At 16 tracks and close to 72 minutes, it’s a full commitment. Singles “I Believe in You,” “Kingdom Undersea,” “A Death in London,” and “Evergreen” have given a clear preview of the direction.

What works: Under the Radar Magazine scored it 8/10 and made a sweeping claim: “Ladytron have secured their iconic status once again, ensuring they become a cult band for an entirely new generation, or maybe more.” The 13th Floor went straight to the point: “Truly, Ladytron have produced, created an album full of dancefloor bangers.”

What doesn’t: AllMusic puts the ceiling on it well: “More diluted than truly disappointing, Paradises boasts enough standout tracks to please fans, but with more shaping and a sharper mix, it could’ve been one of Ladytron’s great albums.” At 16 tracks, not everything earns its place, and fans of the band’s leaner, icier earlier work may find the dance-floor warmth less satisfying.

Also out this week:

The Casualties – Detonate: New York street punk veterans return with their first album in eight years, and as Punktastic put it, “it goes off.”

The Dandy Warhols – Pin Ups: A 17-track covers record nodding to Bowie’s 1973 album of the same name, filtering Gang of Four, The Cure, Violent Femmes, The Clash, and a dozen others through decades of Dandy Warhols DNA. Better than it needs to be.

David Gray – Nightjar: Nineteen unreleased songs from the Life In Slow Motion sessions (2003-2005), out of the vault and onto streaming. Hot Press scored it 8/10: “fascinating and often very lovely.” If you loved that era of Gray’s catalog, this is a gift.

Fresh in the Hopper

These are recent listener suggestions sitting in the queue, waiting for their moment. A few caught my attention this week.

Proudentall, What’s Happening Here (2000), submitted by Matthew Dunehoo, who has a personal stake in this one: it’s his own band. A Kansas City emo/post-rock group from 1995, influenced by Sunny Day Real Estate, Fugazi, and Jawbox, they shared a split 7” with The Anniversary and were re-released on Caulfield Records (the same label that had Christie Front Drive and Boys Life). One member went on to The Appleseed Cast. Matthew is a first-time submitter, and the story behind this one is exactly the kind of thing DMO was built for.

More, Warhead (1981), submitted by Chip. The singer, Paul Mario Day, was an early Iron Maiden vocalist (1975-76) before the band found Bruce Dickinson, and later joined Sweet. More opened for Maiden on the Killers tour and played Monsters of Rock 1981. Then they disappeared. Totally forgotten. Chip’s doing the Lord’s work with this one.

Bear Vs. Shark, Terrorhawk (2005), submitted by Willie Dillon. Post-hardcore that keeps getting recommended into the Hopper. Willie suggests the remastered compilation version. If you know it, you know. If you don’t, it’s worth finding out why people keep pushing it.

Foghat, Girls to Cheat & Boys to Bounce (1981), also from Chip. Beyond “Slow Ride” and “Fool for the City,” Foghat made 17 albums. Chip owned this one first, picked it up for a dollar, and is finding out what the rest of the catalog holds. That’s the spirit.

Got a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Drop it in the Hopper.

That’s the week. What did I miss? What are you spinning this weekend? Reply and let me know.

That needs to change.

How L7 Formed in the Echo Park Punk Scene

L7 started in 1985 in Los Angeles, born out of the Echo Park art punk community. Donita Sparks(vocals, guitar) and Suzi Gardner (guitar, vocals) had both worked at the LA Weekly at different times. When Gardner handed Sparks a tape of songs she was working on, Sparks called it “one of the happiest days of my life.” Gardner already had underground cred: she’d sung backing vocals on Black Flag‘s “Slip It In” in 1984.

But LA in the mid-80s was not exactly welcoming. Sparks told Crack Magazine:

“I found LA to be a borderline misogynistic town, especially in the rock world. Guys who wanted to play hard rock didn’t want to be playing with chicks.”

Their first drummer, a man, was kicked out for “calling us cunts and bitches and not wanting to play a gay bar.” So how did they keep going? Jennifer Finch showed up.

Finch joined on bass in 1986, bringing connections and fearlessness. She’d played in Sugar Babydoll with Courtney Love, and she knew Brett Gurewitz of Epitaph Records. Sparks remembered her impact: “When Jennifer came in she had a lot of drive, she was fearless in talking to people and asking for things.” Venues that had turned them down suddenly opened up.

The name “L7” itself was a deliberate choice. It’s 1950s slang for “square,” and if you make an L and a 7 with your hands, they form a square. More importantly, it was gender-neutral. Sparks told SPIN: “We did not want a gender-specific name. I wanted people to listen to our music and go, ‘Who the fuck is this?’”

After cycling through drummers (including the debut album’s Roy Koutsky, who got “so drunk during practice he’d fall off his throne”), Chicago native Demetra “Dee” Plakas joined in late 1989. The classic lineup was locked. Chicago Tribune‘s Greg Kot later nailed why she mattered: “Their secret weapon remains drummer Dee Plakas.”

L7’s Sound: Where Punk Meets Sludge Metal

How do you describe L7’s sound? Imagine a Ramones song played through Black Sabbath‘s amplifiers, with Dick Dale surf guitar lurking underneath. It’s punk velocity meets metal weight, with hooks sharp enough to draw blood.

Sparks brought the punk: Ramones, Sex Pistols, the B-52’s. Gardner brought the sludge: Sabbath, Deep Purple, Hawkwind, Led Zeppelin. Together, their guitars created what Greg Kot described as “low-end guitar chug, a sound that suggests the idling engine of a Harley-Davidson.”

Were they grunge? Not exactly. Were they riot grrrl? Not that either. They preceded and inspired both movements, but fit comfortably into neither. Sparks was characteristically blunt in a 1993 SPIN cover story: “There was the girl band thing, there was the foxcore farce, there was the Seattle band farce, there was the grunge-rock thing. We’ve been around longer than all that stuff. Basically, we’re a rock band from Los Angeles.”

They called themselves “slob girls,” and the aesthetic was purposeful. Ratty hair, thrift-store punk fashion, heavy eyeliner or none at all, snarls instead of smiles. Finch performed barefoot. i-D Magazine called them “true style icons” and credited Sparks’ washed-out blue hair and Finch’s super red locks as originating the home-dyed crazy color look. As Sparks put it: “If we were gonna be looked at, we were gonna be thrashin.”

L7’s 90s Discography: Every Album Ranked and Reviewed

Smell the Magic (1990, Sub Pop Records)

L7’s major statement arrived on September 1, 1990, courtesy of Sub Pop Records and legendary producer Jack Endino, the man who recorded Nirvana‘s Bleach. Originally a six-track EP, it expanded to nine tracks on CD, with photography by Charles Peterson.

Here’s a detail that tells you everything about the era: the false start at the beginning of “Shove” (which opens the album) is actually a segment of a Mudhoney jam session that accidentally got caught on the recording reel. They kept it.

Rolling Stone gave it four stars, praising “Donita Sparks’ and Suzi Gardner’s twin lockstep guitars racing down the highway to hell” and calling it “one of Sub Pop’s finest hours.” The magazine later ranked it #37 on their list of the 50 Greatest Grunge Albums, noting it “was an electric shock in a sea of grey” and “one of the most widely cited as an inspiration by the next wave of punk and riot grrrl bands.” Robert Christgau gave it an A. Ugly Things ranked it #24 among the top 40 punk albums of all time.

Why does this matter for the bigger 90s story? Because Smell the Magic dropped before Nevermind, before Bikini Kill‘s first demos, before the word “grunge” meant anything to a record executive. L7 wasn’t riding a wave. They were the water.

Bricks Are Heavy (1992, Slash Records)

This is the one. Released April 14, 1992, on Slash Records, Bricks Are Heavy was produced by Butch Vig at Smart Studios and Sound City Studios. How did they land Vig? L7 had visited Nirvana in the studio during the Nevermind sessions. When that album exploded, their reaction was simple: “We want that guy.”

The album opens with “Wargasm,” featuring a sampled scream from Yoko Ono, who reportedly said she “had her fingers crossed for the group as it was time for their music to get popular.” Then comes the centerpiece: “Pretend We’re Dead.”

The song’s origin story is pure Donita Sparks. She was heartbroken over a guy and her first thought was “I just pretend that you’re dead.” Then it pivoted. She told SPIN: “What about ‘pretend we’re dead’? I liked that because that was a children’s game. And then it became kind of a commentary on Reagan/Bush-era apathy.” SPIN called the finished product “a perfectly immediate slice of ‘bubblegrunge,’ simultaneously channeling the noisiness of an active trash compactor with the effortless pop of opening a soda can.”

“Pretend We’re Dead” climbed to #8 on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, spending 20 weeks in rotation. It also hit #21 in the UK and #5 in Finland. The album reached #1 on the US Heatseekers chart, #24 in the UK, and sold over 327,000 copies in the US.

The critics loved it. Entertainment Weekly‘s Gina Arnold gave it an A, describing “catchy tunes and mean vocals on top of ugly guitars and a quick-but-thick bottom of cast-iron grunge” and calling L7 “simultaneously fun and furious.” Kerrang!‘s Steffan Chirazi gave it a perfect 5/5. Robert Christgau gave it another A, noting it “never quite gathers Nirvana’s momentum, but it’s just as catchy and a touch nastier.” NME‘s Angela Lewis praised its “polished, virile white heat rock” and warned L7 shouldn’t be pigeonholed “in the vein of ‘Hole-Babes-Jane.’” AllMusic‘s Eduardo Rivadavia later called it L7’s “crowning achievement” and “an impossible act to follow.”

Not everyone agreed. Rolling Stone‘s Arion Berger felt Vig’s “neatly modulated dynamics” made the album “merely raucous where it might have been apocalyptic.” There’s something to that. But commercially and culturally, this was L7’s peak, and Rolling Stone ranked it #15 on their 50 Greatest Grunge Albums.

Sparks captured the awkwardness of underground success: “If you’re from the underground, you get almost embarrassed about your hit. All of a sudden, it starts to separate you from the scene that you came from.”

Hungry for Stink (1994, Slash/Reprise Records)

The follow-up arrived July 12, 1994, produced by GGGarth Richardson at Sound City. The album title? Derived from an ad the band saw in Bear Magazine, a gay publication “for and about big hairy men.” That’s the most L7 thing imaginable.

This is the grittiest, nastiest record in their catalog. Entertainment Weekly‘s Greg Sandow gave it an A+, writing that while earlier albums “were forceful and bratty,” Hungry for Stink “is far more sophisticated, with a musical surprise on nearly every track,” cementing L7 as “one of the top hard-rocking bands of any kind, gender be damned.” Chicago Tribune‘s Greg Kot declared “L7 affirms that it is a great band” with their “strongest batch of songs.”

It peaked at #117 on the Billboard 200 (their highest chart position) and #26 in the UK. The standout track “Fuel My Fire” would later be covered by The Prodigy on their massive 1997 album The Fat of the Land, introducing L7’s DNA to an entirely different audience.

Robert Christgau gave it an A- in the Village Voice, crediting L7 for avoiding grunge’s “dull despair” and keeping their music “rooted in the rock and roll everyday, where it belongs.”

The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum (1997, Slash/Reprise Records)

Here’s where the story gets complicated. Released February 25, 1997, and produced by Rob Cavallo and Joe Barresi, this album marked a deliberate artistic pivot. The title itself was a double joke: “The Beauty Process” referred to Sparks putting on her “fright makeup” before shows, while “Triple Platinum” was pure sarcasm about their commercial standing (they hadn’t even gone gold).

Jennifer Finch had departed to return to college. Bass duties were split between Greta Brinkman and Sparks herself. The band slowed down, got more adventurous, and dropped the need to prove anything. Sparks explained: “In the past, I think we wanted to prove that we were tough cookies. We wanted to show that we could rock harder than anyone. Now we’re more secure. So we have more freedom.”

Rolling Stone‘s Alec Foege loved it, writing that L7 had “matured into punk’s distaff Jagger and Richards” and delivered “more fresh stylistic variations on classic punk into 40 minutes than most bands come up with during a career. Clever, cocky and ultimately ageless.” But Entertainment Weeklyinitially gave it a B, then included it on their “flop albums of 1997” list due to poor sales. Reprise Records dropped the band.

Sparks has called this her personal favorite L7 album. She wasn’t wrong to believe in it. But the marketplace had moved on.

Slap-Happy (1999, Wax Tadpole/Bong Load Records)

Dropped by their major label? Fine. L7 formed their own label, Wax Tadpole Records, and made the record anyway. Now a trio (Sparks, Gardner, Plakas), they recorded on a shoestring budget with producer Brian Haught.

Sparks didn’t hide the motivation: “Almost a spit in the eye of our label, who had dropped us. It was like, ‘Fuck you, we’re going to make another record anyway, so fuck off!’”

The album features “Freeway,” a hip hop-influenced track with sampled Casio keyboards inspired by an LA Times article about a man who stopped his truck on a freeway and committed suicide. “Crackpot Baby” featured L7’s first-ever three-part vocal harmony. The critics were lukewarm. Exclaim! called it “a fairly solid record” but one “mainly going to appeal to fans.” The Austin Chronicle filed its review under the brutal heading: “The Nineties are over.”

But the promotional stunt? Chef’s kiss. L7 hired a plane to fly a banner reading “Bored? Tired? Try L7” over Lilith Fair at the Rose Bowl. The next day, they flew “Warped needs more beaver...love, L7” over the Warped Tour in New Jersey. That’s the kind of band they were.

Rock for Choice, Reading Festival, and the Moments That Define L7

Co-Founding Rock for Choice (1991)

In October 1991, L7 and LA Weekly senior editor Sue Cummings partnered with the Feminist Majority Foundation to create Rock for Choice, loosely modeled on Bob Geldof’s Live Aid. The inaugural concert at the Hollywood Palace on October 25, 1991, featured Nirvana, Hole, L7, and Sister Double Happiness. After the show, a conversation between L7 and Dave Grohl at the afterparty helped shape the series’ visual identity. Subsequent shows featured Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mudhoney, Rage Against the Machine, X, Pearl Jam, and Foo Fighters. Within two years, the New York Times reported 37 such concerts nationwide. The series ran through 2001.

The Reading Festival Tampon Incident (1992)

At the 1992 Reading Festival, L7 had been chosen to appear by Kurt Cobain himself. Then everything went wrong. The airline lost their gear. They recovered guitars but not pedals, borrowed equipment with no soundcheck, and fought feedback throughout their set. The crowd got ugly, pelting them with mud.

Sparks’ response became one of rock’s most infamous moments. She told Guitar World: “It really felt like an assault, so I pulled my tampon out, and I threw it at them.” She yelled: “Eat my used tampon, fuckers!” The tampon has been called “one of the most unsanitary pieces of rock memorabilia in history.” Sparks has remained unapologetic.

On the career impact, she was pragmatic: “We were thinking, ‘Oh, man, maybe we’ve got a shot at being bigger than we are.’ It didn’t happen. That’s the way the mud clump crumbles.”

Pop Culture Appearances

L7 appeared in John Waters’ 1994 dark comedy Serial Mom (starring Kathleen Turner) as a band called “Camel Lips.” Waters reportedly made them leggings with “faux camel toe pussies in the crotch.” Their video for “Pretend We’re Dead” aired on Beavis and Butt-Head, where in a later episode, the characters argued that “one chick from L7 could kick all their asses combined” (referring to Tiffany, Wilson Phillips, and Debbie Gibson). They played the main stage at Lollapalooza 1994 alongside The Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Breeders.

L7’s Influence on Grunge, Riot Grrrl, and Women in Rock

L7’s legacy is the kind that shows up in other people’s stories more than their own. Smell the Magicpredated and inspired the riot grrrl explosion. The Prodigy carried “Fuel My Fire” to millions. “Shitlist” soundtracked Natural Born Killers and became entrance music for professional wrestler Jon Moxley. “Pretend We’re Dead” lived on through Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

i-D Magazine framed their impact clearly: L7 “carved out a space in popular music that would eventually make way for other badass females, think Shirley Manson, Courtney Love and Gwen Stefani.” Kerrang! in 2019 named them one of the “Ten Bands No One Expected to be So Influential Today,” calling them “one of rock’s most volatile and respected acts. Predictable on paper, anything but on stage.”

In 2014, after Sparks started a Facebook page that quickly rallied their fanbase, L7 announced a full reunion with the classic lineup. Their first show back was Rock am Ring in Germany on June 6, 2015. The 2016 documentary L7: Pretend We’re Dead, directed by Sarah Price, drew on Sparks’ 100+ hours of home video and featured testimonials from Joan Jett, Shirley Manson, Krist Novoselic, Lydia Lunch, and Butch Vig. Jett later signed L7 to her Blackheart Records label for their 2019 comeback album Scatter the Rats.

As of 2026, L7 is still going. They celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2025 with a takeover of The Belasco Theater in downtown LA. This summer, they’re touring with Amyl and the Sniffers, including a date at Red Rocks. Forty-one years in, and they’re still thrashin.

Why L7 Is a Missing Piece of the 90s Puzzle

L7 was always stuck in the spaces between categories. Too punk for the metal kids. Too metal for the punk kids. Too feminist for the mainstream. Too rock and roll for the feminists. They didn’t soften their sound, didn’t apologize for their bodies, didn’t play nice with interviewers, and didn’t pretend to be anything other than what they were: four women who could level a room.

Sparks summed up the mission simply: “We get letters from young girls who say that we’re their inspiration for picking up an instrument, and that makes us really proud. We didn’t really have role models growing up.”

When Alternative Press looked back at L7’s peak, they described a band that was “positively bulletproof and larger than life. Not as come-hither nymphs or saucy rock star minxes bestowed with privilege but as a hard-rocking unit that could not be messed with.”

That’s the story. L7 didn’t need the world’s permission to be great. They just needed you to finally notice.

So here’s the question for the comments: if you could introduce someone to L7 with one album, which one are you picking? Smell the Magic for the raw gut punch, Bricks Are Heavy for the hooks, or Hungry for Stink for the sheer nastiness? Make your case.

Suggest an album for the podcast: Suggest an album

From Moscow, Idaho to the Irish Charts

Josh Ritter is not a household name in the American rock conversation. He should be. He grew up in Moscow, Idaho, a small college town in the state’s panhandle: a tiny purple dot in a sea of crimson red. Both of his parents are neuroscientists. When he got to Oberlin College in Ohio, he promptly abandoned the family science track and created his own major: American History Through Narrative Folk Music.

That is either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or the most perfectly calibrated act of self-determination in the history of undergraduate education. Given that it led directly to opening for Bob Dylan, the evidence tips toward the latter.

After Oberlin, Ritter spent time studying at the School of Scottish Studies, moved back to Rhode Island for open-mic nights, and eventually crossed paths with Glen Hansard of The Frames. That connection became a lifeline. Hansard brought Ritter into the Irish music world, and the results were immediate. His third album, Hello Starling, debuted at number two on the Irish charts before Ritter fully understood how big he’d become there. Ireland claimed him before America did.

By the time The Animal Years arrived on V2 Records in March 2006, Ritter had something rare: a passionate audience, critical credibility, and a story that felt like it was still building.

The Sound: A Room, a Piano, and Something Underneath

Credit Brian Deck for knowing what this record needed to be. Deck, who had already produced Iron and Wine and Modest Mouse and had Fruit Bats in his catalog, built The Animal Years around intimacy. Not sparseness. Intimacy.

The difference matters. There is a warmth here that feels like a small club on a Tuesday night, close enough to see the player’s hands but never so close it feels claustrophobic. Sam Kassirer’s piano sits at the center of almost every track, melodic rather than percussive, guiding without dominating. Zack Hickman‘s bass lines have the round, resonant quality of an upright instrument. David Hingerty’s drums are heavy on toms, giving the low-mid range a pulse that keeps the record from floating away into pure atmosphere. And then there’s the Hammond organ, which mostly plays it straight until it doesn’t.

The keyboard presence recalls Bruce Springsteen‘s Nebraska-era approach: not the main event, but the emotional weather underneath. There are echoes of The Jayhawks and Gary Louris in the way the arrangements breathe. Ritter’s voice, chest-resonant and slightly husky, threads through comparisons to Bob Dylan‘s phrasing and John Hiatt’s lived-in warmth. All of those references point at the same thing: this is a record that wears its influences without being consumed by them.

There is also something else in here, if you’re wearing headphones. Listen closely to “Monster Ballads” and you’ll find a synthesizer loop, almost subliminal, buried under the acoustic instrumentation. You miss it on speakers. On headphones it changes the song. That Deck and Ritter hid it rather than featuring it tells you something about their approach to this record.

The Songs: War Dressed as Love

Ritter has said he set out to write about America, and it all kept coming out sounding like a love song. That tension is the engine of The Animal Years.

“Girl in the War” opens the album with biblical imagery and wartime dread wrapped in one of the most deceptively singable melodies on the record. “Paul said to Petey, you gotta rock yourself a little harder” is a line that sounds like a folk standard on first listen and reads like an anti-war prayer on the third. Pair it with “Thin Blue Flame” and the album’s anti-war bookends come into focus.

“Thin Blue Flame” is the main event. At nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds, it earns every second. “The days are nights and the nights are long / Beating hearts blossom into walking bombs” is the kind of writing that doesn’t happen by accident. It sits in the lineage of Bob Dylan‘s “Masters of War” and shares something of Bright Eyes‘ orchestral drama on I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. The song builds through tom fills and stacked organ chords until it reaches something genuinely dissonant and genuinely cathartic. It’s the one moment where everything goes off-script. A couple more moments like that would have pushed The Animal Years to another level.

“Idaho” does something quieter and equally precise. The lyric about masts turning to cedar trees and wind to gravel roads builds a sense of place so specific it almost aches. It may be the album’s purest sense-of-place moment. “Good Man” delivers Springsteen-esque character writing, grounded in chord changes that feel old and true, with the organ drop a third of the way through standing as one of the most satisfying ten seconds on the entire record.

And “Monster Ballads,” it turns out, is not about monster ballads. It’s about Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and the decline of the Mississippi River steamboat at the hands of the railroad. Ritter even toured in a white suit in Twain’s honor. The album contains more buried literary architecture than its warm, accessible surface suggests.

What Doesn’t Work

The honest critique of The Animal Years is also its most consistent one: it plays it safe.

On first listen, it can feel like vanilla. Nothing reaches out and grabs you. The second half front-loads the ballads, which compounds the album’s natural tendency toward slow burn. “In the Dark” is the one track that’s hard to defend: not bad, just fine. You wish Deck had pushed further in places, treated the drums differently, brought in some affected electric guitar, done something to disturb the record’s considerable comfort. The album earns its Sunday-morning-with-coffee reputation almost too easily.

For some, the record’s warmth might read as distance. The literary depth isn’t announced. You have to come looking for it. And if you don’t? The back half can feel like it’s asking you to meet it more than halfway.

The Verdict

Here’s where things get interesting. The Animal Years scored an 80 on Metacritic and an A- from the A.V. Club in 2006. Twenty years later, the r/JoshRitter subreddit consistently votes it Ritter’s masterpiece by a wide margin, with “Thin Blue Flame” winning a track-by-track poll of the album. Sputnikmusic users have rated it 4.5 out of 5. Albumism ran a 15th anniversary retrospective in 2021 calling it a benchmark.

And yet: a wider mainstream rock audience in 2006 was not listening. The Iraq War surge was coming. Ritter was writing about it before most people were ready. Does that explain the gap between the record’s reception and its reach? Is this an album that landed in the wrong year, or the right one?

The critical consensus and the casual listener experience pull in opposite directions, and that tension doesn’t resolve cleanly. Is The Animal Years a masterpiece that rewards patience, or an album that asks for more than a casual listener is prepared to give? Which song makes the strongest first-impression case for a newcomer? Is “Thin Blue Flame” the kind of nine-minute centerpiece that defines a catalog, or a bold experiment that works better in context than in isolation?

Hit play on this week’s episode to hear where we land. Then drop your take in the comments.

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Welcome back to patron Scott Halgrim, who nominated the album

• 2:01: Josh Ritter’s origin story: From Moscow, Idaho to Oberlin College’s self-invented folk major, to Ireland via Glen Hansard and the Frames

• 7:23: Career overview and discography: Stephen King’s Entertainment Weekly rave, the Royal City Band, two novels, and a catalog that runs through 2024

• 9:42: Patron poll reactions: Ian McIver delivers his verdict (’album best forgotten’), Gavin goes in blind and lands on EP

• 11:04: Production and lineup breakdown: Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron and Wine), Sam Kassirer on keys, and the V2 Records context

• 12:17: What works, Jason: Piano-forward arrangements, Hammond organ tension, intimate room sound, Jayhawks and Springsteen Nebraska comparisons

• 17:05: Girl in the War: Opening track clip, Paul, Petey, the dove from above; religious and wartime allegory on display

• 17:57: What works, Tim: Hidden synth textures in Monster Ballads, war subtext in 2006 Iraq context, Wolves and Good Man as character studies

• 18:58: Monster Ballads: Ones and zeros bleed, the digital imagery verse that rewards headphone listening

• 22:34: What works, Scott: Girl in the War and Thin Blue Flame as anti-war bookends; the organ drop in Good Man; Idaho’s cedar-tree lyric as pure sense of place

• 25:29: Thin Blue Flame: The album’s most explicitly anti-war moment: days are nights, beating hearts blossom into walking bombs

• 27:09: Idaho and the texture of voice: Chest-y resonance, upright bass warmth, tom-heavy rhythm, why this record sounds closer to John Hiatt than a stripped Americana album

• 30:40: What doesn’t work: All three hosts: plays it too safe, back half front-loads the ballads, In the Dark is the one track nobody fights for

• 32:42: Good Man: These chords are old but we shake hands, Springsteenesque character writing in action

• 37:12: Thin Blue Flame production spotlight: The one moment the record goes off-script: dissonant organ climax, building toms, Bright Eyes comparison

• 39:46: The verdict: Where the hosts land on the album, and why the patron poll pulled in a very different direction

• 44:25: Outro: Scott sign-off with a nod to So Runs the World Away

Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

Suggest an Album

Gold-Certified. Headbangers Ball-Approved.

Dangerous Toys did everything right. The rock history books still left them out.

Half a million copies sold. Billboard 200, peak position #65, 36 weeks on the chart. Heavy rotation on Headbangers Ball for two singles. An evil killer-clown mascot named Bill Z Bubb on every T-shirt at every arena show from ‘89 to ‘91. And yet, ask someone to rattle off the great debut albums of the late-80s hard rock moment and you’ll hear Appetite, Skid Row, Warrant, maybe even Bang Tango if they’re feeling generous. Dangerous Toys? Barely a footnote. If you know, it feels like a secret handshake. If you don’t, this is your invitation in.

That’s the story this album tells in 2026: not the tragedy of obscurity, but the stranger, more irritating story of an album that earned its run and still got erased. Because grunge didn’t just kill hair metal. It buried some genuinely great records. This is one of them.

From Onyxx to Austin’s Finest

Before they were Dangerous Toys, they were Onyxx, two X’s, one terrible name, and all the ambition of a band that knew they were built for something bigger than the Austin club circuit. They formed in 1987, got spotted by a Columbia Records rep at South by Southwest, and signed before most of their Sunset Strip contemporaries had figured out the right shade of spandex.

That origin matters. Austin in the late ‘80s was not Los Angeles. It wasn’t built on the same industry machinery, the same Sunset Strip hustle, the same management-and-mogul food chain that turned Poison into a phenomenon. Dangerous Toys came from a place where ZZ Top was a local institution and Southern boogie was in the water. That Texas DNA would end up being both their greatest asset and the thing that kept them from fitting neatly into any radio format.

At the center of it was Jason McMaster, a singer with a secret. Before Dangerous Toys, McMaster fronted Watchtower, one of Austin’s most technically ambitious metal outfits. Progressive rhythms, Judas Priest-adjacent precision, the kind of musicianship that gets you credibility in every circle that matters. Then he traded all of that for a killer clown mascot and some of the sleaziest riffs of 1989. It paid off. For a minute.

The result of that pivot: a band that had more going on under the hair than anyone gave them credit for. McMaster thinks of himself as a heavy metal musician first. Dangerous Toys just happened to arrive at the party in the right costume.

Max Norman Turns Up the Punch

Here’s a detail that reframes everything: Dangerous Toys was produced by Max Norman at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys. Let that sink in. The man behind Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman and Blizzard of Ozz. The man who would go on to produce Megadeth‘s Countdown to Extinction and Youthanasia. He also produced Lynch Mob, Grim Reaper, Death Angel, and Armored Saint, a résumé that reads less like a hair metal producer and more like a hard rock mercenary who could sharpen any band’s edges.

And that’s exactly what this record sounds like. Don’t come here expecting the warm, Aerosmith-inflected low end of Appetite for Destruction. This is punchier. More compressed. The guitar tones have a crispness that sits closer to thrash territory than to Slash‘s velvet-smooth Les Paul. When McMaster’s voice lands on top of it, part Axl Rose snarl, part power-metal projection, the whole thing crackles with a productive tension you don’t always get from the genre.

That production choice is the fingerprint of McMaster’s real identity. He wasn’t making a glam record. He was making a heavy metal record in a glam package. As McMaster told Chris DeMakes A Podcast in 2025:

“I’m a metal guy. I’ve always been a metal guy.”

Norman understood that, found the middle ground, and delivered an album that’s tighter and harder than its reputation suggests. The Van Halen guitar tone invoked during “Scared” isn’t an accident. It’s a peak-era melodic metal choice from a band that knew exactly what it was reaching for.

The Songs: Side A Is a Sledgehammer

Start with “Teas’n, Pleas’n.” The album’s opener does something that most late-80s hard rock openers don’t bother with: it earns its sleaze. That bluesy boogie riff is the obvious entry point, the hook that gets you nodding along. But then the mid-section hits a time signature shift, McMaster goes into full character mode, and the chord choices underneath get genuinely interesting. This is not a paint-by-numbers Sunset Strip retread. The band is showing you something.

Then comes “Scared,” and it’s unanimous. If you talk to anyone who knows this record, anyone in a Dig Me Out comment thread, any r/hairmetal regular, any guy who wore the Bill Z Bubb shirt to a 1990 show, “Scared” is the song. The Alice Cooper cameo is the kind of detail that should have been a story. The melody is direct and devastating. The guitar work reaches for the 1984/5150 era Van Halen tone and mostly gets there. Chip Midnight has had this on every hair metal playlist he’s ever made, which at this point spans about 35 years. That kind of staying power isn’t an accident.

“Queen of the Nile” shows up and throws you off in the best way. It’s got a power-pop structure that sounds more like Killer Dwarfs than Austin, Texas, and that element of surprise is part of what makes Side A work so well. The first six or seven songs give you multiple versions of this band. Each one is committed, each one has a distinct personality, and McMaster holds all of it together with the sheer force of his delivery.

Side B Runs Out of Gas

Let’s be straight about it. The back half of this record does not match the front half. That’s not a knock; plenty of great albums have this problem. But it’s real, and anyone who loves this record knows it.

“Ten Boots (Stompin’)” lands as a less interesting version of “Teas’n, Pleas’n.” Same template, lower stakes. “That Dog” feels generic in a way none of the Side A tracks do. “Sport’n a Woody” is lyrically juvenile in a way the rest of the album has the good sense to at least dress up. It’s not offensive, just thin, and it’s over fast enough not to be a dealbreaker. Classic cassette-flip problem: Side A earns the purchase, Side B makes you hit rewind.

The deeper critique, the one that stings, is the comparison test. Appetite for Destruction isn’t just better-produced in the warm-and-fat sense. It has a deeper bench of singles. Every track on that record could have been a single. Dangerous Toys peaks earlier and coasts later, and that gap is where the difference between “Gold record that people still talk about” and “Gold record that became a secret handshake” lives. The talent is here. The consistency isn’t quite.

That said, and this matters, there is not a song on this album that makes you want to skip it forever. Every track delivers conviction. For a genre where filler was practically a feature, that’s a meaningful distinction.

The Grunge Erasure Problem

By 1991, Dangerous Toys were on the Operation Rock and Roll package tour alongside Motörhead, Judas Priest, Alice Cooper, and Metal Church. Right as Alice in Chains and Nirvana were exploding. The tour may not have even completed its run. Whatever momentum they’d built, two Gold-adjacent albums, two Headbangers Ball singles, a recognizable mascot, evaporated practically overnight.

They’d spent their entire touring cycle in the theater-level range: The Cult, Bonham, LA Guns, Faster Pussycat, Trixter. Solid package tours, 5,000-to-8,000-seat rooms. Never arena status. Never the one crossover moment that makes a band untouchable when the tide turns. When grunge arrived, bands at that level had nothing to grab onto. The bands who survived the switch, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Ozzy, had legacy status as a lifeline. Dangerous Toys had been a band for four years.

The Austin origin story cuts both ways here. Being outside the Sunset Strip machine gave them their sound. It also left them without the industry infrastructure that kept other acts alive through the transition. There was no big-name manager fighting for their legacy. There was no hometown mythologizing machine. There was just the music, which was genuinely good, and the timing, which was genuinely cruel.

Skid Row and Warrant survived because their radio hooks were more polished, their major-label machinery was stronger, and, let’s say it plainly, the cultural appetite for precisely their version of hard rock held slightly longer. Dangerous Toys were a different proposition: a little rougher, a little stranger, a little more McMaster than market research. That’s exactly what makes the record interesting in 2026. It’s also exactly what made it vulnerable in 1992.

So Where Does This Leave Dangerous Toys?

Here’s where it gets interesting. The fans never left.

Sputnikmusic users rate the album 4.5 out of 5. The r/hairmetal threads are full of people who are genuinely baffled it doesn’t come up more often. Rock and Roll Globe ran a 35th anniversary retrospective in 2024. McMaster himself gave a long, engaged interview about the record in 2025. And in December, the Dig Me Out community voted it to the top of the poll over Ozzy, LA Guns, and Lillian Axe, not because it needed to be discovered, but because it needed to be discussed.

So the question isn’t really whether this album is good. It’s whether “good” was ever the problem. Was it the timing? The mascot? The Austin address instead of a Sunset Strip one? Was Side A strong enough to carry Side B, or did the drop-off cost them the kind of replay loyalty that separates a Gold record people remember from a Gold record people forgot?

All three hosts have their take, and they don’t all agree on where this album lands. You’ll have to hit play to hear the full verdict.

We want yours too. Drop it in the comments: Where does the Dangerous Toys debut sit for you? Top-tier sleaze metal, or a record that peaks too early and coasts? And what’s your favorite track: is it “Scared,” or is there a deeper cut that deserves more love?

Episode Highlights

• Intro: Album overview and the December 2025 poll reveal

• 17:49: Teas’n, Pleas’n, the bluesy opener with a mid-song time signature surprise

• 20:10: Scared, the unanimous fan favorite and the Alice Cooper cameo story

• 21:03: Queen of the Nile, the power-pop curveball nobody expected from Austin

• 26:26: Scared (revisited), playlist staple debate and 35 years of replay value

• 27:25: Outlaw, Dokken comparisons and the George Lynch guitar tone

• 27:29: Here Comes Trouble, the hard rocker where McMaster’s voice really lands

• 28:07: Feels Like a Hammer, the Zeppelin-esque acoustic intro and the power ballad question

• 29:12: Take Me Drunk, the humor and the misheard lyric that made everyone laugh

• 30:27: Sport’n a Woody, lyrically juvenile but mercifully short

• 35:58: Production deep dive, Max Norman’s thrash-adjacent approach and why this isn’t Appetite

• 40:34: Ten Boots (Stompin’), the Side B drop-off begins

• 42:27: That Dog, the consensus weak link

• 46:10: The verdict, where all three hosts land on the album

• Outro: Nominator shoutout to Keith Miller

Join the dmounion.com to pick your favorite lost record and join us on the show.

Have a lost or forgotten album that deserves the spotlight? Suggest it here.

Here’s the thing about the mid-70s.

While America was busy with stadium rock and the UK was deep in prog excess, something was happening in the margins. Something heavier, weirder, and way more honest. A batch of bands — from Melbourne to Helsinki, from London, Ontario to Los Angeles — were making records that deserved a bigger audience than they ever got.

These are four of them.

Same era. Very different worlds. All of them carrying that raw, unfiltered 70s energy that you just can’t manufacture. Each one has a legitimate claim to your vote. Each one has a story worth knowing.

So let’s dig them out.

🇦🇺 Skyhooks — Living in the 70’s (1974)

Imagine releasing your debut album — and having six of the ten tracks immediately banned from commercial radio.

That’s exactly what happened to Melbourne’s Skyhooks in 1974. The Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters took one look at songs like “You Just Like Me ‘Cos I’m Good in Bed” and “Motorcycle Bitch” and said: absolutely not.

The band’s manager, Michael Gudinski, was delighted.

The album hit #1 in Australia and stayed there for 16 weeks. It became the best-selling album by an Australian artist up to that time. And in a defiant twist, the ABC’s brand new youth station 2JJ — which would eventually become the national Triple J network — chose “You Just Like Me ‘Cos I’m Good in Bed” as the very first song they ever broadcast in January 1975.

Produced by Ross Wilson of Daddy Cool fame, Living in the 70’s is glam rock with an Australian accent — eyeliner and irony, loud costumes and suburban poetry. Lead singer Graham “Shirley” Strachan belts it out like he’s got something to prove and nowhere left to be polite about it. The songs are about sex, drugs, boredom, and growing up in Melbourne’s inner suburbs when the kids of the sixties were finally done listening to their parents.

It’s a national treasure that most of the world has never heard.

🇫🇮 Hurriganes — Roadrunner (1974)

You want to talk about a band that redefined a country’s musical identity?

Hurriganes didn’t just make a great album. They basically invented Finnish rock.

Roadrunner — named after the Bo Diddley song and featuring that classic Chuck Berry “Johnny B. Goode” intro DNA courtesy of guitarist Albert Järvinen — hit #1 in Finland in 1974 and became the best-selling Finnish album by a Finnish band for over a decade. It’s Finland’s seventh-best-selling album of all time.

The lineup was a trio: Remu Aaltonen on vocals and drums, Cisse Häkkinen on bass, and Järvinen on guitar. Lean, loud, and locked in. The album was recorded in Stockholm at Marcus Music Studios, and the cover — band members sitting in the backseat of a Cadillac in Helsinki — has been voted Finland’s greatest album cover multiple times.

The song they almost didn’t include, “Get On,” has since been repeatedly named the finest single rock & roll song ever released in Finland. They added it as a throwaway because the album ran short. That’s the kind of accidental greatness that defines this record.

Power boogie roots ‘n’ roll at its absolute finest.

🇨🇦 Thundermug — Thundermug Strikes (1972)

Once billed as “the heaviest band in the world.”

That’s a bold claim. But drop the needle on Thundermug Strikes and you’ll start to understand it.

These London, Ontario kids — Joe DeAngelis on vocals, Bill Durst on guitar, Ed Pranskus on drums, and Jim Corbett on bass — started in their garage in 1970 covering the Beatles and Stones. By 1972, they were recording at Toronto Sound Studios with engineer Terry Brown, who would later go on to produce Rush and Klaatu. That pedigree shows.

Their cover of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” was the first single. Radio programmers started playing “Africa” instead — one of the only rock songs you’ll ever hear with a kazoo solo — and it cracked the national Canadian top 30.

The album was released domestically on Axe Records, then picked up by Epic Records in the US, where selections from their first two albums were compiled under the Thundermug Strikes title. Critic Richie Unterberger called it a “reasonable job of representing the sound of this Canadian hard rock band.” Which, to be fair, undersells how ferociously these songs hit.

Thundermug never got the mainstream spotlight. What they left behind is a raw, heavy, and genuinely unique slice of early 70s rock that deserves way more ears.

🇬🇧🇺🇸 Detective — Detective (1977)

Here’s a band with one of the most remarkable backstories in all of 70s rock.

Jimmy Page signed them. Led Zeppelin’s own Swan Song Records was their label home. And the producer credited on four of the album’s ten tracks is listed as “Jimmy Robinson” — a name so suspicious that rock historians have spent decades speculating it’s actually a Page pseudonym. (For the record: it isn’t. Probably.)

The lineup reads like a 70s rock fever dream: Michael Des Barres on vocals (fresh from Silverhead, Deep Purple’s Purple Records act), Michael Monarch on guitar (the original Steppenwolf guitarist, the guy on “Born to Be Wild”), Tony Kaye on keyboards (the original Yes keyboardist), and drummer Jon Hyde.

Des Barres howls like a wounded warrior across tracks like “Got Enough Love” and the dense, riff-heavy opener “Recognition.” The guitar tone is described by Louder Sound as “the archetypal sloppy leviathan,” and drummer Jon Hyde is called “as gonzo as Bonzo.” That’s a hell of a comparison — and on tracks like “Grim Reaper” and “Wild Hot Summer Nights,” it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration.

Neither Detective album charted well. But Jimmy Page loved them, they toured as support for Kiss, and they’ve maintained a devoted cult following ever since. If you love Physical Graffiti-era Zeppelin and want something less omnipresent, Detective slaps.

🗳️ Cast Your Vote

Four albums. Four countries. One very specific kind of heavy that only the early-to-mid 70s could produce.

If we don’t dig out these albums, who will? 🎸

Want to suggest a heavy 70s or 80s album for a future poll? Drop it in the hopper. The best suggestions come from you.

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Here’s a question that should bother you: How does a band record with Steve Albini for the better part of a decade, tour with Pavement and Guided By Voices, get signed to Matador Records, and still end up a footnote?

That’s the Silkworm story. And Firewater, their blazing, bleary-eyed fourth album, is the record that makes you wonder what went wrong. Or maybe what went right, depending on how you feel about fame versus integrity.

From Montana to Nowhere (on Purpose)

Silkworm didn’t come out of some scene-blessed city with built-in press coverage. They came out of Missoula, Montana. Think about that for a second. Not Seattle. Not Chicago. Not even Minneapolis. Missoula. A college town surrounded by mountains and indifference.

Tim Midyett (bass/vocals), Andy Cohen (guitar/vocals), and Joel RL Phelps (guitar/vocals) all attended Hellgate High School in Missoula, the same school, as it happens, that produced Steve Albini. They started as a band called Ein Heit in 1985 before rechristening themselves Silkworm in November 1987. By early 1990, they’d made the move to Seattle, right before Nirvana blew the city’s music scene wide open.

But here’s the thing: Seattle didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat. As Midyett later recalled, the band played “an endless number of sparsely attended shows” over their first four years in town. They weren’t part of the grunge narrative. They weren’t Sub Pop darlings. They were just three guys from Montana playing to a dozen people on a Tuesday night.

Then Albini called. Literally. During a Silkworm radio interview on WNUR at Northwestern University, Albini phoned in to contact the band. Old high school connections die hard, apparently. That call led to a recording relationship that would span nearly a dozen albums and define Silkworm’s sound for the rest of their existence.

The Departure That Made the Album

By 1994, Silkworm had released three albums and an EP with Albini. But something was shifting. Joel RL Phelps, co-founder, singer, guitarist, and one-third of the songwriting brain trust, left the band mid-tour. His departure was seismic for the small but devoted fanbase. Phelps was an essential voice. How do you lose that and keep going?

You become a trio. And you make Firewater.

Released on February 27, 1996, on Matador Records, Firewater was the remaining three-piece of Midyett, Cohen, and drummer Michael Dahlquist essentially proving they didn’t need a fourth member, or anyone’s permission, to make something extraordinary. Albini engineered the record, as he would for nearly every Silkworm release. Sixteen tracks. One hour. An unpleasant bender well worth the hangover.

Honest Rock at the Bottom of a Bottle

Let’s talk about what this record is. The title isn’t subtle. Firewater. The opening lines of the album: “No more simple tunes / No more easy poon / It takes so many millions to get laid.” From note one, this is an album about drinking, and everything that spirals out of drinking. Fear. Betrayal. Forgiveness. The bonds of friendship fraying under the weight of one more round.

But calling it a “drinking album” sells it short. Magnet magazine nailed it when they named Firewater a Lost Classic: “Saying the album was solely about dipsomania and its associated despair sells it short... Fear, betrayal, forgiveness and the bonds of friendship received equal play in these tough, spare numbers.”

What makes it work is the push and pull between control and chaos, which, if you think about it, is exactly what alcohol does to a person. The album starts focused, deliberate, almost rigid. Then it loosens. The arrangements unravel. The guitar solos go off the rails. It’s a structural metaphor hiding in plain sight.

The Bass That Hits Like Shellac (But Sings Like Something Else)

Here’s what grabs you first: the bass. Midyett’s tone is immediately recognizable if you’ve spent any time in Albini’s universe. It’s thick, gritty, and sits right at the front of the mix. You hear it and you think Shellac. You think Jesus Lizard.

But then something different happens. Midyett’s bass lines are melodic. They don’t just hold down the root. They run, they climb, they carry the song. On tracks like “Nerves” and “Drunk,” the bass is essentially the lead instrument, laying down a foundation that lets Cohen’s guitar and the vocal melody dance around it. It’s busy without being chaotic. It’s the skeleton and the bloodstream at once.

And those vocals. Both Midyett and Cohen split singing duties across the album. Midyett handles tracks like “Drunk,” “Wet Firecracker,” and “Cannibal Cannibal,” while Cohen takes the mic on “Nerves,” “Slow Hands,” and “Tarnished Angel.” The delivery is borderline spoken-word at times: honest, unpolished, somewhere between Stephen Malkmus’ slacker drawl and Mac McCaughan’s insistent yelp from Superchunk. There’s vulnerability in it. A willingness to be odd. As Albini himself said in a Reddit AMA: “Beautifully weird songs, singing that was genuine and unafraid to be odd, amazing guitar playing, heroic drumming, great, great band.”

When Albini said that about you, you know it was true. The man didn’t bullshit. Rest in peace.

Andy Cohen: The Secret Guitar Hero

Now let’s talk about the guitars, because this is where Firewater starts to reveal its hidden depth.

Andy Cohen didn’t develop his style by accident. In a 1997 interview, he described “untold hours of practice”, obsessive, daily sessions dating back to high school, driven by an emotional impact he wanted to convey but didn’t yet have the proficiency to realize.

That discipline shows up all over Firewater. “Slow Hands” is the showcase, a patient, tension-filled track that builds toward guitar runs recalling J Mascis at his most transcendent. There’s a precision to the playing, but also an intentional sloppiness: that thing where the overdrive bends the notes in unexpected directions, where the player lets the effects guide the sound into territory that only a handful of guitarists ever really nail. Mascis does it. Neil Young does it. Cohen does it.

“Drag the River” delivers another searing solo. “Severance Pay” opens with an in-your-face guitar blast. And then there are the moments of controlled chaos: Cohen switching between clean technical runs and Octafuzz wails that scream over the top of the mix. He’s the hero of this record, the one element that keeps pulling you back for another listen even when the album’s length starts to test your patience.

Dahlquist’s Controlled Fury

Michael Dahlquist’s drumming deserves its own paragraph because it’s doing something that most Albini-associated recordings don’t. It’s restrained. If you listen to a lot of records that came through Electrical Audio, the drums tend to bash, partly because that’s the nature of the bands Albini works with. But Dahlquist plays with control and nuance. On the mellower tracks, he purposely holds back, letting the dynamics breathe. On the heavier moments, he leans in with authority. There’s even a jazzy quality to some of his patterns: the way he treats the cymbals, the way his fills sit in the pocket without overwhelming the arrangement.

It’s the kind of drumming you don’t notice at first. Then you listen again. And again. And you realize it’s the glue holding everything together.

The Case Against an Hour

Here’s where it gets complicated. Sixteen songs. Sixty minutes. For a three-piece band with no piano, no organ, no backing vocals, no additional textures beyond bass, guitar, drums, and two voices, that’s a lot to ask.

The first half of Firewater is undeniable. “Nerves” is a perfect album opener: urgent, hooky, immediately memorable. “Drunk” strips things down to bass, drums, and a low, almost Ian Curtis-like vocal that channels post-punk darkness. “Wet Firecracker” is a two-minute blast of energy. “Slow Hands” unfolds like a slow-burning epic. “Tarnished Angel” is one of the record’s finest moments, a song that just about everyone who encounters this album falls in love with.

But by the back half, the sharpness starts to wane. “Miracle Mile” pushes the vocal into a thin, forced register without enough instrumental muscle to prop it up. “Killing My Ass” wanders. “Cannibal Cannibal” rambles where it should punch. The ideas become looser, the melodies more fleeting. The catharsis gets lost in another meandering track.

Their previous album, Libertine, was 46 minutes. The one after this, Developer, clocked in at a lean 36 minutes. Firewater was their first Matador release, and maybe the temptation to fill the space was too strong. But this band’s superpower was efficiency. Bass-driven hooks. Direct vocal delivery. Dynamic guitar work. Give me 10 or 11 of these songs and you’ve got a stone-cold classic. At 16, the water starts to dilute the fire.

Two Albums Hiding in One

Here’s an interesting way to think about it: there might be two records buried inside Firewater. One is the dark, focused, bass-driven post-punk record that opens the album and produces its best tracks. The other is something subtler, an alt-country undercurrent that surfaces on songs like “Tarnished Angel,” “The Lure of Beauty,” and even “Miracle Mile.”

“The Lure of Beauty” is a weird one. It’s got a broken, off-kilter rhythm that sounds, of all things, like an indie rock band trying to channel the Rolling Stones. Think Voodoo Lounge-era Keith Richards stumbling through a riff while Jagger gropes for the melody. It’s disjointed on purpose, and the fact that Silkworm nearly pulls it off is admirable.

That twang, that Midwestern underbelly: it connects Silkworm to bands like Uncle Tupelo and Paw. There’s a “Great Plains rock” thing happening here that never really got its own scene name the way Seattle grunge or Midwestern emo did. Silkworm were from Montana. Cursive came from Nebraska. Paw were from Kansas. Something in the geography, the open space, the isolation, produced bands that understood both heaviness and heartbreak without needing a coastal scene to validate them.

The Tragedy That Ended Everything

On July 14, 2005, Michael Dahlquist was killed at a Skokie, Illinois intersection. A 23-year-old woman named Jeanette Sliwinski, distraught after an argument with her mother, deliberately accelerated her car to nearly 90 miles per hour and rammed it into the back of a Honda Civic stopped at a red light. Dahlquist and two friends, John Glick of The Returnables and Doug Meis of Exo and the Dials, were killed instantly. They had been on their lunch break from work.

Tim Midyett announced immediately that Silkworm could not continue without Michael. The band was done. Eighteen years of music, gone in an act of senseless violence.

Cohen and Midyett eventually formed Bottomless Pit, a new band with Chris Manfrin of Seam and Brian Orchard of .22. A posthumous Silkworm EP, Chokes!, was released in 2006. And in 2013, filmmaker Seth Pomeroy released the documentary Couldn’t You Wait? The Story of Silkworm, a title taken from a song on Libertine, that traced the band’s entire arc from Montana basements to Chicago stages to the unthinkable end.

The Reunion Nobody Expected

Then, in 2024, Steve Albini died suddenly from a heart attack. And something remarkable happened: Joel RL Phelps, Andy Cohen, and Tim Midyett reunited as Silkworm for a tribute show, with Jeff Panall of Mint Mile sitting behind Michael Dahlquist’s own drum kit. They played three songs. It was the first time the surviving original members had performed together in over 20 years.

One thing led to another. By September 2025, Silkworm was playing full live dates again, with more shows planned into 2026. And in February 2026, Matador Records celebrated the 30th anniversary of Firewater, a reminder that the record’s reputation has only grown in the three decades since it was released.

What Firewater Really Is

Strip away the tragic backstory. Forget the cult status and the what-ifs. What is Firewater as a piece of music?

It’s honest rock. Not performatively raw. Not strategically unpolished. Just a band playing in a room with a guy who knows how to record them, making songs about the mess of being alive and occasionally drunk. The bass leads. The guitar solos shred and wail and surprise you. The drums know when to hit and, more importantly, when not to hit. The vocals don’t try to be anything they’re not.

It’s too long. That’s real. Trim four or five songs and you’re holding one of the great indie rock albums of the ‘90s. As it stands, you’re holding a flawed, ambitious, occasionally transcendent record that rewards patience and repeat listens, especially in that staggering first half.

Firewater spills a lot. But what doesn’t evaporate lingers in ways that cleaner, tidier albums never could. Thirty years later, it still burns going down.

Songs in this Episode

• Intro - Nerves

• 19:28 - Quicksand

• 21:28 - Drag the River

• 29:06 - Cannibal Cannibal

• 31:07 - The Lure of Beauty

• Outro - Don't Make Plans This Friday

Nobody in America got the memo. Except Cleveland.

That’s the wildest part of the Next story. WMMS — the legendary Cleveland radio station that helped break Springsteen and Rush — threw the record on the air not because a label was pushing it, not because there was payola, but because a program director just liked it. They didn’t just play a single — within the first week of airplay, five tracks from Next became top requests. They played every track. Even “Gang Bang.” On the radio. And Cleveland lost its mind for this band in a way that the rest of the country just… didn’t.

Here’s how regional that obsession was: the majority of Next‘s US pressings were sold in Cleveland. People in the city genuinely assumed SAHB was huge everywhere. They weren’t. If you went to Cincinnati, nobody had a clue.

That’s the kind of story that should have you sprinting to your streaming app right now.

Who Was Alex Harvey, Anyway?

Here’s the thing — Alex Harvey wasn’t some wide-eyed kid chasing his first record deal when Next dropped. Born February 5, 1935, in Glasgow’s working-class Kinning Park district, Harvey had been grinding for nearly two decades by the time this album came out. He’d won a newspaper competition as “Scotland’s answer to Tommy Steele” back in 1957. He’d led the Big Soul Band through British ballrooms and the same Hamburg club circuit that built the Beatles’ reputation. He’d played in the pit band for the London production of Hair. By 1972, he was a seasoned road veteran on roughly his third band. That experience shows. This wasn’t a guy stumbling into ideas. These were choices. Very specific, very weird, very deliberate choices.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band came together in 1972 when Harvey joined forces with four members of Tear Gas, a Glasgow-based progressive rock outfit. Guitarist Zal Cleminson — who wore white mime-style face paint on stage, looking like a precursor to KISS before KISS was even KISS — would later join Nazareth for three years. Bassist Chris Glen and drummer Ted McKenna (both of whom later played with the Michael Schenker Group) locked in a groove that was simultaneously raw and theatrical. And crucially, keyboardist Hugh McKenna — Ted’s cousin, and the man whose piano work defines this entire album — co-wrote the majority of the songs with Harvey. If you’re going to talk about what makes Next sound like nothing else, you have to talk about Hugh McKenna.

The producer? Phil Wainman — the same guy who’d eventually produce The Fine Art of Surfacing by the Boomtown Rats, home to “I Don’t Like Mondays.” He also worked with Sweet, the Bay City Rollers, XTC, and Generation X. Not a bad résumé.

What Next Actually Sounds Like

Let’s be honest: the first listen is genuinely confusing. In a great way.

You’ve got swampy, boozy blues rock. You’ve got glam theatrics that belong in a 70s stage musical. You’ve got 1950s sock-hop covers. You’ve got a seven-minute electronic-leaning epic that sounds like it invented loops before loops were a thing. You’ve got a tango-waltz about a military brothel — a cover of Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel, adapted into English by Mort Shuman and Eric Blau — sung with a mock-Parisian accent, with lyrics about a young soldier’s encounter with gonorrhea. In 1973.

The album opens with “Swampsnake,” and right away you know you’re not in Kansas — or anywhere remotely normal. It’s got that natural, unforced groove that 70s production captured effortlessly, like a groove you fall into rather than one you’re pushed toward. Harvey’s voice is the center of gravity throughout — imagine Bon Scott if Bon Scott had a broader theatrical vocabulary and zero interest in playing it safe. That comparison isn’t accidental: Wikipedia confirms SAHB were “influential in Australia, most notably to AC/DC, particularly their singer Bon Scott.”

Then comes “Gang Bang.” Which is exactly what it sounds like. Harvey was clear that it depicts a liberated woman in complete control — but make no mistake, the song isn’t dancing around anything with metaphors. It’s explicit, it’s outrageous, and WMMS played it after 10pm. 1973 was something else.

Here’s the underrated key to this whole record: it’s piano-driven. And that piano belongs to Hugh McKenna.

Most 70s hard rock is guitar-forward. SAHB flips it. McKenna’s piano carries melody and rhythm in a way that gives the whole album a different center of mass — think barrelhouse blues muscle meeting glam rock energy. When Cleminson’s guitars come in, they’re the exclamation points. That wah-drenched guitar on “Vambo Marble Eye”? Nasty and cool in the best way.

McKenna co-wrote every original track on the album with Harvey. His playing allows the album to breathe across wildly different moods — dropping into a waltz, picking up for something frantic, pulling back so strings can creep in. On “The Last of the Teenage Idols,” the piano opens the song in a moody ballad space before guitars come crashing in to deliver the rock payoff. That range is what makes Next feel like a weird, sprawling, beautiful mess rather than a confused one.

Here’s a trivia gem: “The Faith Healer” was released as a single. A seven-minute single. The album itself eventually reached #37 on the UK Albums Chart in 1975 — two years after release — and was certified Silver for 60,000 copies shipped.

The song builds in loops and layers, repeating motifs that evolve slowly into a full-bore rock moment. In hindsight, it sounds like a prototype for electronic music — like the DNA of what would become dance music and post-punk in the 80s and 90s is buried right there in that track.

The list of bands that have covered it tells you everything about its reach: Recoil (1992), Foetus (1992), The Church (1999), Helloween (1999), The Cult (2000), Saxon (2023). This is a song that musicians know and worship. That it lives in obscurity for casual listeners is one of rock history’s great injustices.

The influence runs even deeper than cover versions. Nick Cave said in 2018: “My first band was basically an Alex Harvey cover band. We did ‘Framed,’ ‘Isobel Goudie,’ ‘Faith Healer,’ ‘Gang Bang,’ ‘Next,’ ‘Midnight Moses,’ everything.” That band — The Boys Next Door, formed at Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne in 1973 — later became The Birthday Party, one of post-punk’s most important groups. And Robert Smith of The Cure offered this: “People talk about Iggy Pop as the original punk, but certainly in Britain the forerunner of the punk movement was Alex Harvey.”

The Album’s One Flaw

There’s a real tension at the heart of Next. When the band gets ambitious — “The Faith Healer,” the title track “Next,” “The Last of the Teenage Idols” — they’re doing something nobody else was doing. The world-building, the character work, the sonic experimentation — it feels like an album that’s trying to become something.

But then “Giddy Up a Ding Dong” shows up. It’s a 1950s rock and roll cover — a Freddie Bell and Joey Lattanzi song — that sounds like a sock hop collided with a pub set list. Right between “The Faith Healer” and “Next.” It’s the equivalent of Mötley Crüe covering “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” between two of their darkest album cuts. You feel the Scottish pub band DNA poking through when the ambition briefly runs out.

The lack of a cohesive songwriting vision is the one knock. Are they a pop band? Art rock? A rock opera? A theatrical live act padding out a setlist? On Next, the sonic palette holds it all together, but conceptually, the seams show. Strip “Giddy Up a Ding Dong,” and what you have is one of the most fascinating EPs of the early 70s. Leave it in, and you’ve still got a worthy, singular album — just one that shows where it came from.

Should You Listen?

Yes. Go now.

Start with “Swampsnake.” Then “The Faith Healer.” Then “Next.” Then “Vambo Marble Eye.” That’s your four-song entry point into a band that’s somehow still waiting to be discovered 50 years later.

And look up the live footage — Old Grey Whistle Test performances are on YouTube. Watch Zal Cleminson’s clown-painted face contort behind his guitar while Harvey prowls the stage. The record makes more sense once you see it. It always did.

Alex Harvey died of a heart attack on February 4, 1982 — one day before his 47th birthday — waiting to board a ferry home from a gig in Belgium. He went out doing what he’d been doing since the mid-1950s: playing rock and roll. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band made music that belongs in the same breath as the early Alice Cooper band and the glam-adjacent weirdos who dared to treat a rock stage like a theater. They just happened to come from Glasgow, never quite broke America, and left behind an album that makes you genuinely ask — why wasn’t this band huge?

Songs In This Episode

• Intro - The Faith Healer

• 23:18 - Giddy-Up-A-Ding-Dong

• 25:23 - Swampsnake

• 31:11 - Next

• 33:55 - The Faith Healer

• 35:18 - Vambo Marble Eye

• 41:47 - Gang Bang

• Outro - Gang Bang

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New Releases

Rob Zombie – The Great Satan

You know Rob Zombie. Even if you haven’t kept up with his solo work, you remember “Dragula.” You remember White Zombie. You remember the horror-movie-carnival-barker thing he does better than anyone alive. Well, after a five-year gap — unusually long for a guy who once released albums like clockwork — he’s back with his eighth studio album, and the consensus is clear: this is the heaviest Zombie record in a long, long time.

Zombie reassembled the Hellbilly Deluxe-era lineup — guitarist Mike Riggs and bassist Rob “Blasko” Nicholson — alongside drummer Ginger Fish. That original chemistry is back, and you can hear it immediately. The songs rarely cross the four-minute mark, the riffs are relentless, and the whole thing plays like Zombie stopped overthinking and just made a loud, ugly, joyous record.

What works: Fans on Reddit’s r/RobZombie are calling this a top-three Zombie album, right behind The Sinister Urge and Hellbilly Deluxe. VerdamMnis Magazine describes it as a return to his “more satisfying early universe.” Montreal Rocks nails it: “Play F.T.W. 84 loud and you’ll see the design. Play Tarantula in a car and watch your foot press harder on the gas.” And The Headbanging Moose calls the whole thing “pure excellence.”

What doesn’t: It’s a Rob Zombie record, which means it’s uneven — and he’d probably admit that. Both VerdamMnis and The Headbanging Mooseflag “Out of Sight” and “Revolution Motherfuckers” as weaker tracks that fall under the “terrible curse of instant skip.” If you’re in the “we’ve heard this before” camp, nothing here will convert you. But if you’re in the mood? Your butt will be shaking.

Crooked Fingers – Swet Deth

If you know Archers of Loaf, you know Eric Bachmann. If you know Bachmann, you know that the man writes like his life depends on it — which, given recent events, hits different now. This is the first Crooked Fingers album in fifteen years, since 2011’s Breaks in the Armor, and it’s been declared one of the year’s most anticipated releases by Vulture, Stereogum, and BrooklynVegan.

The album title came from Bachmann’s son, who came home from school with a stack of macabre drawings — crows, scythes, tombstones — with “DETH, SWET DETH” scrawled across one of them. And here’s the thing that makes it hit harder: Bachmann suffered a heart attack in October, partly from years of insomnia. The song “Insomnia” is literally about the condition that almost killed him.

A correction from the initial notes floating around: this isn’t an electronic or experimental departure. Swet Deth is collaborative, warm, and deeply human — built around Bachmann’s voice and acoustic guitar, animated by collaborators Jeremy Wheatley and Jon Rauhouse, and featuring knockout guest turns from Matt Berninger (The National), Sharon Van Etten, Mac McCaughan (Superchunk), and Liz Durrett.

What works: A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed calls it “easily one of the most listenable new releases in a week positively overstuffed with them.” The Van Etten collaboration on “Haunted” is being singled out as a standout, and the opener “Cold Waves” with Berninger is described as a “moody mid-tempo ramble made richer still.” Sun 13 describes the album as “another Crooked Fingers release destined for the win column.”

What doesn’t: Honestly? The criticism is thin. If anything, the sheer quality of the guest roster might overshadow Bachmann’s own voice on a couple tracks — but that’s a minor quibble for an album this fully realized.

Bill Callahan – My Days of 58

Bill Callahan doesn’t make small talk. Not in person, not in his songs, and definitely not in album titles. His eighth record is named after his age, which he considers almost “taboo” in indie rock. But here’s what’s remarkable: rather than the brittle, somber Smog-era introspection you might expect from a record about getting older, My Days of 58 is the most open, funny, and alive Callahan has ever sounded.

Ninety percent of this album is autobiographical — the highest ratio Callahan has ever admitted to. As he told Rolling Stone, he overcame years of writer’s block through therapy, moved back to Austin from Santa Barbara because he “needed the familiarity,” and recorded with his touring band live in the studio. The song “Why Do Men Sing” includes a dream he had about Lou Reed after Reed’s passing.

What works: KLOF Mag puts it beautifully: “Embracing uncertainty has made his songs wiser than ever. They are also funnier, sadder, you might say deeper.” The Any Decent Music aggregate critic score sits at a strong 7.9. If you’ve ever loved the guy’s work, this is a career highlight.

What doesn’t: The pace is deliberately unhurried — some tracks stretch and breathe in ways that reward patience but may test it across twelve songs. If you need momentum, the middle section can feel like it’s floating rather than driving.

Voxtrot – Dreamers in Exile

Remember Voxtrot? Those Austin indie-pop darlings who soundtracked your mid-2000s with jangly guitars and Ramesh Srivastava’s earnest vocals? They broke up in 2010, reunited tentatively in 2022, and now — nineteen years after their self-titled debut — they’ve dropped their second full-length album. Recorded at bassist Jason Chronis’ Haunted Air Studio in Lockhart, Texas, and mixed by Dean Reid (Lana Del Rey, James Blake).

Five of the album’s eleven tracks were previously released as singles between 2023 and 2025. That’s a bold structural choice. But The Big Takeover argues it works: “The writing is consistent, as are the arrangements, so DiE doesn’t read like a copy-and-paste hodgepodge.” Also — note the acronym. Dreamers in Exile = DiE. The Big Takeover believes this was intentional.

What works: Glide Magazine says the band “reunites with purpose and focus,” noting that “instead of trying to recreate their early jangle pop sound, it shows what happens when a band reunites with more experience and a clearer perspective.” The Big Takeover calls closer “Babylone” an “orchestral, Baroque triumph” and “a perfect end to a thoughtful, resonant album.” This isn’t a nostalgia trip. It’s the real thing.

What doesn’t: Some longtime fans are understandably skeptical that 19 years can be bridged authentically. And the heavy reliance on pre-released singles means diehard followers who’ve been streaming those tracks for years may feel like they’re only getting six truly new songs.

Iron & Wine – Hen’s Teeth

Sam Beam’s Iron & Wine has been the indie folk world’s most reliable constant for over two decades. After what many considered a long stretch of merely OK releases, 2024’s Grammy-nominated Light Verse was a genuine creative renaissance. Now, just months later, comes Hen’s Teeth — a sibling album drawn from the exact same Los Angeles recording sessions.

This isn’t an outtakes collection. Beam deliberately held these songs back, creating what amounts to a double album released in two acts. He drew inspiration from Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and you can hear it in the looseness of the arrangements. His daughter Arden sings prominently throughout, and Grammy-winning folk trio I’m With Her appears on two tracks.

What works: KLOF Mag calls it “decidedly darker” than Light Verse, praising the “emotional ambiguity at every turn.” NARC Magazine describes it as “gently euphoric... sonic bliss.” No More Workhorse highlights the standout “Dates and Dead People” as a “mini-suite” that shifts time signatures with “casual audacity.” Paste Magazine continues the praise. Multiple critics note it’s not just a companion piece — it stands firmly on its own.

What doesn’t: The rapid-fire release schedule after Light Verse has some fans worrying about oversaturation. At ten tracks, it’s more focused than sprawling, but if Light Verse didn’t land for you personally, this operates in the same sonic neighborhood.

Paul Gilbert – WROC

You know Paul Gilbert from Mr. Big (”To Be With You,” the drill-on-the-guitar-strings guy) and from Racer X, where he basically redefined what shred guitar could do in the ‘80s. His new album has one of the wildest concepts in recent rock memory.

WROC stands for Washington’s Rules Of Civility — as in George Washington’s 16th-century etiquette guide. Gilbert literally set the founding father’s rules of manners to rock music. As he told eonmusic: “I’ve never in my life had such a good time writing songs!” Song titles include “If You Soak Bread in the Sauce,” “Turn Not Your Back (To Others),” and “Go Not Tither.” Many lyrics are Washington’s words verbatim. This is also his first vocal album since 2016, and it was recorded live in just four days in Portland with Nick D’Virgilio on drums. The first pressing of CDs sold out before release.

What works / what doesn’t: Formal reviews are still incoming as of press time. But the concept alone — virtuosic guitar hero turns colonial etiquette into rock anthems while wearing a tricorn hat — is either going to delight you or make you raise an eyebrow. Given Gilbert’s track record of making the absurd sound effortless, we’re leaning toward delight.

New Found Glory – Listen Up!

New Found Glory — those Florida pop-punk lifers who’ve been soundtracking suburban angst since the late ‘90s — are back with their first album in six years. And the context matters here: guitarist Chad Gilbert is battling metastatic cancer. The band channeled that fight into Listen Up!, an album about finding hope through hard times.

Despite the heavy circumstances, this isn’t a somber record. Punktastic describes it as “an island of consistency in the rapids of the scene.” Bearded Gentlemen Music goes further, calling it “the most inspired album of New Found Glory’s career” and comparing it favorably to Sticks and Stones and Catalyst. “Medicine” apparently sounds like Matthew Sweet and Tom Petty wrote a pop-punk song together.

What works: The energy is undeniable. Kerrang highlights the “west coast punk style,” and Rock DNA Mag calls it “some of their best work to date.” “Frankenstein’s Monster” — a song about Gilbert’s cancer fight — is being singled out as one of the band’s most emotionally powerful tracks despite its upbeat delivery.

What doesn’t: Lyrics. Fans on Reddit’s r/newfoundglory note the writing feels “forced and literal,” with less metaphor and artistic depth than earlier work. The “Dream Born Again” cover breaks the album’s momentum, and the relentless positivity, while admirable given the circumstances, can feel “cheesy” across a full listen.

Moby – Future Quiet

Twenty-three albums in. Let that sink in. Moby — the guy who gave us Play, who soundtracked every coffee shop and car commercial of the early 2000s — has released his quietest, most ambient record yet. And he means it: “Future Quiet is, not surprisingly, quiet.”

The album opens with a reimagined version of “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die,” originally from 1995’s Everything Is Wrong, which had a massive resurgence via Stranger Things. The new version features Gabriels’ Jacob Lusk on vocals — Moby spent weeks tracking him down after hearing his voice on KCRW. “Like anyone who’s heard Jacob sing, I immediately fell in love with his voice,” he told When The Horn Blows.

What works: Spill Magazine calls it “the finest album of the year so far — a breathtaking, ethereal masterpiece.” When The Horn Blows describes it as “the much-needed ear muffs to the world’s noise.” The vocal collaborations — serpentwithfeet, India Carney, Elise Serenelle — are used sparingly and to devastating effect.

What doesn’t: This is 85 minutes of predominantly ambient piano and orchestral compositions. If you’re coming for Play-era bangers, you will be profoundly disappointed. This is a record for headphones and stillness, and that’s a big ask.

Exhumed – Red Asphalt

If you like your death metal drenched in gore, gasoline, and dark humor, Exhumed has been your band for three decades. Red Asphalt is their tenth full-length — a concept album about vehicular horror: car crashes, road rage, zombie biker gangs, and those terrifyingly graphic driver’s ed safety films from the ‘60s.

The Toilet Ov Hell calls this their “greatest and most gratifying full-length since 2000’s Slaughtercult,” noting a return to early goregrind flavors with better songwriting chops. The lead single “Unsafe at Any Speed” brings back the Carcass-adjacent sound of their early career while maintaining the melodic focus they’ve developed over time.

What works: The concept is tight and the band sounds rejuvenated. As The Toilet Ov Hell puts it, it’s “about as nuanced as you are going to get from a band this lowbrow” — and they mean that as a compliment. The lyricism occasionally transcends the gore: “A mausoleum of steel and bone, death stacked upon the loam / A four-wheel coffin funeral home, my automotive catacomb.”

What doesn’t: The Needle Drop gives it a 6/10, and “Shovelhead” gets flagged as the weakest track. If you’re not already on board with deathgrind, nothing here will be your entry point.

Squirtgun – Ghostly Sunflowers

Quick one here: Squirtgun is the pop-punk project of Mass Giorgini, the producer/musician whose studio work touched Green Day, Alkaline Trio, Rise Against, and Screeching Weasel. The band’s history includes a song in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and a tribute video starring Dawn Wells from Gilligan’s Island.

Ghostly Sunflowers is actually a two-track 12” single — “I’m the Ghost” and “Sunflowers” — released via Pirates Press Records. It sold out quickly. Available on Bandcamp too. If you dig melodic punk in the Lookout Records/Descendents tradition, this is worth the fifteen minutes.

Michael Monroe – Outerstellar

If you know Hanoi Rocks, you know Michael Monroe — the Finnish glam-rock legend whose band basically invented the look and sound that Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe ran with. Solo album number thirteen finds Monroe, at 63, still strutting like it’s 1984.

The album cover nods directly to his 2011 release Sensory Overdrive, and the band — Steve Conte, Sami Yaffa, Karl Rosqvist, and Rich Jones — delivers punk-driven sleazy hard rock that channels New York Dolls, Bowie’s Spiders from Mars era, and Motörhead in equal measure. The title? As Monroe explains to Chaoszine: “It’s got nothing to do with space — it’s a slang word meaning something moving at a rapid speed.” Coined by bassist Sami Yaffa.

What works: TotalNtertainment calls it “absolutely vital to the lifeblood of rock music.” Get Ready to Rock says “few artists continue to make music as good and as moving as this.” “Disconnected” and “Shinola” are early standouts.

What doesn’t: HeadBangers Lifestyle is honest: “Will Outerstellar shock or conquer the world? I don’t think so.” If you already love Monroe, you’ll love this. If you don’t know him, this probably won’t be the conversion moment — but it’s a damn good place to start.

Clawfinger – Before We All Die

Here’s a deep cut for the ‘90s heads. Remember Clawfinger? The Swedish rap-metal crew who blended Ministry riffs with Rage Against the Machine politics and Faith No More swagger? They supported Alice in Chains and Anthrax, played festivals everywhere, and then... disappeared. For nineteen years.

Loud Hailer Magazine makes a bold claim: “Would Rammstein exist without Clawfinger? Definitely not!” The band’s influence on industrial-metal is often overlooked, and their return is fueled by the same politically charged fury that made them essential in the first place. As the band puts it on Napalm Records: “We’re back, not to save the world, but to shout unapologetically while it burns.”

What works: The Razor’s Edge says the trademark sound is fully intact — “the guitars, keyboards and programmed sequences taking me back” — and praises tracks like “Tear You Down” and “Going Down (Like Titanic)” as quintessential Clawfinger. Loud Hailer adds that “they managed to outlast most of the competition and copycats.”

What doesn’t: The humor that defined earlier albums — ironic titles like “Biggest & The Best” or the provocatively titled social commentary — has been replaced by a sharper, more direct message. As Loud Hailer notes, the deceptively funny song titles are gone, “substituted by a sharper, leaner, and more direct message.” Whether that’s an evolution or a loss depends on what you loved about them in the first place.

U2 – Days of Ash EP

Nine years. That’s how long it’s been since U2 released original material (Songs of Experience, 2017). Then, on Ash Wednesday, with zero warning, they dropped a six-track protest EP and reminded everyone that this band — love them or cringe at them — still knows how to make a statement.

This debuted at #1 on album sales charts after just half a week of availability. The EP addresses specific real-world events — the killing of Minneapolis woman Renée Good, Iranian teenager Sarina Esmailzadeh, Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen — plus a poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai set to music. Bono confirmed on U2.com that a full album will follow later in 2026 with a “very different mood and theme.” Wikipedia lists the Metacritic aggregate at 78/100.

What works: The Guardian gave it four stars. The Irish Independent declared it their “best release in decades.” Bourbon and Vinyl says “this is some of the best solo’ing The Edge has done in forever” and calls “American Obituary” a straight-up great rock song. The rhythm section sounds spectacular — Larry Mullen Jr. is back and healthy after his shoulder surgery kept him out of the Sphere residency.

What doesn’t: Reddit’s r/U2Band has a thoughtful critique: the lyrics are too literal compared to the universality of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Bullet the Blue Sky.” The closing track “Yours Eternally” featuring Ed Sheeran is the most polarizing moment — Simon Sweetman’s Substack found the inclusion divisive. And some fans find the production occasionally muffles Bono’s vocals. But even Bourbon and Vinyl — who liked the EP overall — admits some autotune on “The Tears of Things” felt like a misstep.