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Hello Sorry State friends! Hope you are all doing well! And I hope you enjoyed our year-end beast of a newsletter. I always have fun reading the picks of my esteemed colleagues, and they did not disappoint! If I'm remembering correctly, there was a little more overlap between our top new releases from the year prior, but I like that we all had the new Personal Damage on our lists. Just to let you in on some hot internal gossip, another one of our staff had this record in his 2023 top picks but forgot to include it in his picture, and being the detail-oriented person he is, he wanted to maintain consistency. Coincidentally, the record was in my top 10 list but not in my photo, and we couldn't just borrow one from the store for the shot because it sold out the day prior! Oh well. Missing from our pictures, but not from our hearts.
My staff pick for this week was among my favorite reissues in our year-end newsletter! It's the 2023 reissue of the Dark Thoughts single, Do You Dream? It was originally released in 2019 ahead of their full-length album, Must be Nice. It includes an alternate 7” only mix of Do you Dream? And an exclusive to this single b-side called It's Too late. The original record was released in 2019 on black, with a small amount on opaque pink wax. This time around, we got two super cool variants: a pink with black splatter (100 copies) and coke bottle green (150 copies). In my photo for the last newsletter, the color of my coke bottle green looked really off. But you can see the true color in our website listing. It's one of my favorite wax colors.
I didn't see this record when it first came through, so it had already been shelved by the time I saw it. I squealed with delight when Jeff came around the corner with it in his hand. He either asked me if I got it yet, or if I’d seen it yet, which I don't remember because I was too locked in on the words Do You Dream? in big pink letters. I was actually late to the game on Dark Thoughts and am grateful to Sorry State for making the band accessible to me, as they quickly became one of my favorite bands of the last couple years.
Directly inspired by the Ramones, these Philly punks do Ramones-style punk better than everyone else, after the Ramones. I just can't imagine anyone not liking them, unless they just don't like cool music. If you don't already know this band, they are massive Ramones fans and they wanted to form a band to play Ramones-inspired music. So they did. They even choose their color schemes for each LP to mirror the main colors used for Ramones LP's, and in the same order. So, their third album, Must be Nice (the album from which this single comes from) uses pink and black to align with the colorway of the Ramones’ third album, Rocket to Russia.
Do You Dream? clocks in at almost a minute and a half. And what a minute and a half it is. Fast and fun, melodic, catchy power pop style o' punk that you'll want to play back to back to back. I love the b-side, It’s Too Late. The guitar is louder and more dominant than the first song, with more aggressive vocals and lots of "WOAH OAH OAH's." Jim Shomo’s flowmo is so damn catchy as he belts out the lines “…bite my tongue and take my time… gonna hold my breath and take what’s mine… gonna quit this town.. take my place.. pack my bags and leave this place.” I mean, every punk band that's worth its salt has an “I’m gettin’ outta this town!” song, and Too Late checks that box.
Hey, I just looked and we have only three or four (there may be one going out as we speak) copies of this single left, so you better hop on it if you want it! You'll either get the pink and black splatter or the coke bottle green. I don't know how many are left of each one, but you will be happy either way! I hope they aren't gone by the time Daniel posts this. I can say with 100% confidence that if you like the Ramones, or just fun and catchy punk, you won't be disappointed. Ok, I'm gonna call it a day. Thank you for reading, and until we meet again....
-Angela