Hello and welcome to another edition of the Sorry State Records newsletter! We have our usual assortment of good news for you this week, including a bunch of ripping new records in stock (don’t miss the Necro Heads or the Guerra Final EPs!), a heap of news about the Sorry State label and distribution, some new flyers for upcoming gigs (finally!), and the usual assortment of staff picks and other content. So let’s get to it!

Necro Heads: Mindless 7” (Kill Enemy Records) We carried a demo tape from this Pittsburgh hardcore band a while back, now they’re back with a total rager of a debut EP. Necro Heads’ sound is burly, straightforward hardcore that I’d put in the same bucket as SOA, Negative FX, Negative Approach, early Agnostic Front… basically the heavier, meaner end of the early 80s USHC sound. While the longer (i.e. one-minute) tracks allow room for the slightest hint of tunefulness, my favorite tracks are the two 30-second smashers that open the record. Necro Heads build both songs around dead simple riffs that prove three chords and a bad attitude are all you need to make great hardcore. You won’t find anything fancy or unexpected here, just eight tracks of compact, punishing US-style hardcore with perfect production and all the energy and anger you need.

Our longtime pals at Social Napalm Records asked Sorry State to be the main distributor for their label’s releases, and we couldn’t say yes fast enough! Going forward, Sorry State is going to be the source for releases on Social Napalm and their sister label for reissues, Negative Insight Records. If you run a store or distro, you can also hit up Sorry State for wholesale copies of these label’s releases.

The first release under this new arrangement is the long-awaited debut LP from Savageheads, titled Service To Your Country. We don’t have a firm release date yet, but the vinyl is in now (as you can see in the above pic) with the jackets and other print coming soon. After that, Social Napalm will release a 12” by Isolant, an industrial crust project featuring a member of Morne. There are a few more very exciting projects on deck after that, but we’re not quite ready to take the lid off them. Keep an eye out for more info.

We’re inching ever closer to the release of the long-awaited repress of Golpe’s La Colpa È Solo Tua LP! We got in the posters we were waiting on, so now we’re just waiting for the pressing plant to shrink wrap everything and ship it to us. This pressing is 400 copies on transparent red vinyl and a new 100-copy limited edition on transparent red and black swirl vinyl. If all goes well, we’ll put those up on the site next week or the week after.

This week we approved test pressings for two upcoming Sorry State 12”s: the debut from Pittsburgh’s Invalid and the vinyl collection of Hüstler’s two sold out cassettes! Both test pressings sound great. We hope they’ll be out soon, but as you know that’s hard to predict these days. As we firm up a release date, we’ll share artwork and preview tracks with you, so keep an eye out for that.

Tomorrow, as part of Bandcamp Friday, we’ll also announce another new release from a Sorry State band! Sorry we can’t share more details with you just yet, but we’re coordinating the announcement with the band and the label we’re co-releasing the record with. Keep an eye on Sorry State’s Bandcamp site and our social media tomorrow (Friday) for the details, and/or read next week’s newsletter!

In this week’s edition of Hardcore Knockouts, Usman asks you to pick sides in a 40-year-old anarcho beef. Check out Usman’s staff pick for the full story.

Cast your vote in the next edition of Hardcore Knockouts on our Instagram stories next Tuesday!

My pick from Sorry State’s Discogs listings this week is this 7” from Suburban Homes. It’s been a while since we heard from this UKDIY-inspired project, but everything they released was great, this single on Neck Chop Records being no exception.

Remember, you can always combine your order from Sorry State’s Discogs site with your order from our webstore and save on shipping!

ZORN IN NYC
FEBRUARY 18

ZORN AND MUTANT STRAIN IN CHARLOTTE NC
FEBRUARY 27

ILLITERATES IN PHILLY, PA
MARCH 11

ZORN IN PHILLY, PA
APRIL 1

MUTANT STRAIN IN LEXINGTON KY
APRIL 30

SCARECROW IN PHILLY, PA
JUNE 16-18

1. Tempter: S/T 12” (Quality Control HQ)
2. Torso: Sono Pronto A Morire 12” (Sorry State)
3. Reckoning Force: Broken State 12” (Not for the Weak Records)
4. Game: Legerdemain 12” (Quality Control HQ)
5. Dissekerad: Inre Strid 12” (Desolate Records)
6. Necro Heads: Mindless 7” (Kill Enemy Records)
7. Karma Sutra: Be Cruel With Your Past... 12” (Sealed Records)
8. Asylum: Is This the Price? 7” (Sealed Records)
9. Fragment: Mind Convulsion 7” (Desolate Records)
10. Guerra Final: S/T 7” (Desolate Records)

Here is our weekly list of the top sellers at Sorry State for the past 30 days. Seems like some of y’all don’t need us to hip you to that Necro Heads record, but maybe we’ll see it go up in the charts next week?

The new release on Australia’s Hardcore Victim Records, a 7” by the amazingly named Thatcher’s Snatch, just arrived yesterday. Get it while it’s hot!

It’s always exciting when a new issue of Maggot Brain magazine drops, and that day is today! If you have checked out any of this zine’s previous issues, you know it’s not one to be missed.

New from Southern Lord Records this week we have a new Sunn release of BBC sessions and a new edition of Power Trip’s Manifest Decimation benefitting the Riley Gale Foundation, which was set up in memory of their sadly departed vocalist.

This week Tankcrimes Records brings us Fucked Up’s mammoth new project Year of the Horse on some pretty nifty colored vinyl, as well as a fresh batch of Dystopia’s classic Human=Garbage LP.

These sold out super quick the first time around, but we just nabbed a few more copies of the Doom singles collection box set on Sonarize Records.

Doomed to Extinction brings us Make Love Not War, a very cool compilation of obscure 80s punk bands from Yugoslavia.

Also in the tape department, we have new demos from Virginia’s N.A.T. and international d-beat project Forget.

We also got in copies of the demo flexi from Maryland / Pennsylvania hardcore band Public Opinion.

Kind of Punk is an art book featuring work by Ross Adams, whose work has been a staple of his hometown punk scene in Oklahoma City.

We just restocked all the recent releases from Desolate Records, so if you went to buy Guerra Final or Dissekerad and saw that it was sold out, now is your time.

Finally, a couple of cool fan club reissues: we got more copies of Cock Sparrer’s great debut album and this collection of early demo recordings from Suicidal Tendencies.