As you might have seen in our recent Top 50 of 2023 article, one of our favorite punk records last year was What Do You Do? from Predeceased, a UK punk trio featuring members of Chubby and the Gang and Thee MVP’s. For all of its straight-ahead grit, there’s a lot of intricate push and pull in the rhythmic parts underneath. You can argue all you want that it isn’t math rock, but listen – it’s 2024. So you actually can’t.
Math rock should have been divided by zero a long time ago. For us, it’s what’s inside that counts… and not just because we’re fecking nerds. It’s just that sometimes the things that influence and surround math rock are more rewarding to listen to than music made for technicality’s sake. It’ll always be at the heart of the blog, but after so many years, we figure it’s more or less okay to visit other scenes. Especially when they’re this fun.
As you think about the new year and the new you, go ahead and sprinkle something punk on it, genre be damned. It’s not even that crusty, come on. Here’s the new video for “Scene Parol,” the song whose title just got us so worked up we forgot what we’re even talking about.
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Oh yeah, that’s right. We’re talking about a dope record. This was one of the songs that stood out to us for sure, with it’s sinewy Jazzmaster leads and marathon drums. That being said, it was their tribute to MF Doom that gave us a hint that there was more substance here than just any old punk band.
Last year they toured with McClusky, Fall of Troy, and Quicksand, all of who have their own unique grips on technical, manic strains of punk that have been fairly influential to math rock, but we wouldn’t call them math rock to their faces. We’d just glad punks like Predeceased let us write about them on Fecking Bahamas.
Well shit, people of Earth, have we got a crazy year coming up. We’ve just downloaded and begun to fuck with Unreal Engine 5 and are recreating our famous ‘World of Math’ feature, which will take a while and be a bit different, but also, well worth it. We’re also getting back on the horse about the ol’ East Coast // Midwest compilation, as well as some cool writeup and interviews. We won’t be doing as many of those this year as we normally do, but stay in touch, message, email, etc. and we will get back to you. Oh, and hopefully within a couple months, we’ve got some merch for y’all to enjoy too. We’re thinking 2024 and the next will finally be the ones that all of this momentum we’ve built actually catapults back and takes the blog to the next level. We seriously can’t wait. We can feel it. We love you.