Ranking the Sum 41 Albums: From Pop-Punk to Thrash Metal
With eight records across a 27-year discography, each of Sum 41’s albums have ranged widely in style from pop-punk to thrash metal.
With eight records across a 27-year discography, each of Sum 41’s albums have ranged widely in style from pop-punk to thrash metal.
Country Westerns’ music is tight, propulsive, and unafraid to meld genres. Their “punk chutzpah with classic rock sheen” is unafraid of country and blues flavors.
Like political populism, punk’s traits and tenets are sufficiently vague, contradictory, and unmoored to be vulnerable to co-option by all political opportunists—including the fascist alt-right.
Black Flag’s Damaged is a valuable document of the past as well as a prophetic testimony to the values of present and future hardcore punk music.
Alabama’s Model Citizen boast a pair of Drive-By Truckers and punk rock bonafides on the loud and proud new album, Live at Dial Back Sound.
Post-punk revivalists Shame’s Food for Worms shows a band unafraid to move beyond their sound. The result is anthemic, pulverizing, thoughtful, and expansive.
Japanese pop-punkers Shonen Knife recognize their perceived novelty to outsiders and utilize it to their advantage: cute and zany as a means of empowerment.
Guitarist Wilko Johnson of pub rock band Dr. Feelgood created a polyrhythmic down-and-up chop on open chords that inspired Paul Weller (the Jam), Hugh Cornwell (the Stranglers), and Jon King (Gang of Four) – and many more.
Tom Verlaine’s death symbolizes the continued denouement of a certain period of New York City history, a time when the word “bohemian” still held some meaning.
Fucked Up’s One Day possesses a brightness and sense of happiness that’s addictive and optimistic, even if the lyrics at times insinuate the opposite.
Brooklyn-based hardcore band Show Me the Body strive to escape banality and preach for the sake of the outcasts on Trouble the Water.
The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks is a solid album of the punk era, but it neither reflects the most explosive music of the era nor the most creative.