DESCRIPTION:
“Purveyors of grand funk hardcore.”

Couldn’t have possibly put it better myself. Ladies, gents, and everyone in between, these are The Punks. THE Punks, as in four Rochester rockers that shouldn’t be mistaken with the stud-donning luddites who still think that push-moshing is the coolest shit. No, because THIS is the pinnacle of punk. Forget everything you’ve come to love about stagnant subgenre of ours, because The Punks are about to re-invent the whole goddamn wheel, meticulously marking off all the checkboxes on your list of “reasons why I love punk” while somehow managing to add even more. Like the preceding project that some of the band’s members originated from, Brown Sugar, The Punks is absolutely marvelous. Subjectively, it’s hard for me to describe their music as anything but that.

But then again, maybe I’ve got a strong bias towards this group, seeing that I unconditionally adore everything about Brown Sugar. To this day, Brown Sugar still remains to be a personal favorite band, with “Birds” holding a sizable soft spot in my heart (https://feral-kid-records.bandcamp.com/track/birds). For the uninitiated, Brown Sugar was a revolutionary hardcore band that stomped around Buffalo, New York for a good while, blasting out an exhilarating, equally-experimental blend of rock and hardcore until they inevitably keeled over a few years back – but not before releasing a rock-solid discography full of amped-up, groove-ridden hardcore jammers within their relatively long-winded lifespan, of course. The group scraped together enough material to put out a number of EPs (along with a single LP), with the majority of their material being released under New York’s Feral Kid Records (http://feralkidrecords.storenvy.com/). As previously mentioned, they were a revolutionary band in my mind, forcing my entire perception of hardcore undergo a sea of change after listening to a handful of their songs. Despite what some X-handed meatheads might tell you, modern hardcore is, inherently, fucking boring. At this point, the primary ambition of hardcore, with that being to play fast and/or mean, has been done a million times over, to the point where there’s at least three times the amount of shitty, uninspired hardcore bands than there are legitimately worthwhile ones. I mean, that should be expected when you’re sacrificing melody for tempo; there’s only so many riffs and breakdowns for you to rip off before your band homologizes itself among the rest of the half-baked “rippers” that fed themselves a face-full of dirt once they realized that their shit isn’t anything special. Do I hate hardcore? Of course not, it’s one of my favorite sub-genres, period. But yes, I do wish that the genuine gems weren’t so few and far between one another. Hardcore was an arms race, and at this point, it’s completely plateaued. Now bands have to make an effort in order to differentiate themselves from the generous amounts of competition, be it through songwriting that’s actually worth its salt or multi-genre injections into the tired hardcore formula, which is something that Brown Sugar undoubtedly accomplished with flying colors.

So when I got word that The Punks featured ex-members of the now-defunct Brown Sugar (as well as Rochester’s Death Camp: https://deathcampny.bandcamp.com/releases), I naturally got pretty fuckin’ excited. A member of this Rochester, New York-based hardcore band, Zach, sent me an email containing M4A of the group’s demo tape a few weeks ago... and that was about it, at least until I replied back. Aside from the ambiguous band name and attached artwork, I knew next to nothing about the band. For all I knew, Zach actually could’ve dug this tape out of some musty crate in his dad’s music collection, because these jams definitely sound as if they were yanked straight out of a long-forgotten time capsule. But no, this demo was self-released on a limited run of tapes by the group in mid-2014, prior to The Punks going on tour with Rochester’s Beastman (https://jellymusicinc.bandcamp.com/album/beastman-cs). The group hasn’t released any new material since then, though the group supposedly intends on recording new material for a record at some point. I can stand to wait however, since these five tracks provide more an enough musical sustenance to hold my attention for a good, long while.

[Remaining portion of the write-up is in the comments.]

TRACK LIST:
Tobacco Road – 0:00
Whitey On The Moon – 1:37
C’mon – 3:46
Wishing Well – 7:06
Sweetheart – 9:01

DOWNLOAD: http://www.mediafire.com/file/tg8yx35nujkkoo1/The_Punks_-_Demo.zip