Staff Picks

What’s up Sorry State readers?! It’s my first time in the newsletter, so let me introduce myself! I’m Trevor. I just moved back to Raleigh after 10ish years or so, and I found myself lucky enough to have joined the Sorry State team! My pick for this week is Unidad Ideológica: Choque Asimétrico. Man…. This record absolutely RIPS front to back. Choque Asimétrico is a follow-up to their last s/t LP that also should be played at full volume, waking up your entire neighborhood. The recording on Choque Asimétricois a bit more raw and heavier than the first LP, but still sticks to playing raw and fast as fuck… I love it and could talk about this record for hours! Go check out Unidad Ideológica from Bogotá, Colombia!! If you dig this you should absolutely go check out Salvaje Punk from NYC! Fast as fuck Latino punk, mi gente! Alright, till next time, thanks for reading!

Hello again Sorry State newsletter readers! I hope everyone’s holiday breaks have been filled with whatever you wanted them filled with! Not too much has been happening in my world personally; you all have been keeping me busy with all the orders you have been placing for all the new releases we are getting, as well as the used collections we have been listing online. So thanks for that!

I was in a big listening rut for a while. Nothing really sounded that great to me and I was totally not interested in finding or looking up any new music. I finally broke out of that rut and have been listening to some USHC, particularly Boston and New York hardcore. I was pretty excited when we got a 7” in from a band that I have never really heard of. Radio Raheem put out the Enuf 1988 demo. It’s raw, unfiltered and fun New York hardcore. After reading about the band, one of the main reasons I picked it up to listen to it is because Ari from Lifetime played drums in this band. I am a huge Lifetime fan, so this was an instant listen for me. It sounds exactly how you think it sounds if you know the brand of hardcore coming out of New York at the time. We have a few copies left, and it comes in nice solid packaging with a nice big fold-out insert! So as the description on our site puts it, MOSH SUCKA!

What’s up Sorry State readers? It’s been quite some time since the last staff pick! I hope everyone had a nice end to their 2025 and has been enjoying the new year. The demo cassette from local rippers Plastique Pigs came out and, as expected, it’s killer. Definitely snag one of these bad boys if you haven’t already. RSD Black Friday also came and went, which brought some cool new releases. Per usual, I picked up a couple of the live releases cause there are always some cool ones in the mix. The one I wanted to highlight today is Bill Evans’ Portraits At The Penthouse, a live recording from 1966 featuring Eddie Gomez on bass and Joe Hunt on drums. I wasn’t really planning on picking this one up, but at the end of the day, there was still a copy or two left, so I decided to grab it, and I’m glad I did. An excellent release with lots of love put into it. It has a nice gatefold jacket with a cool photo on the inside, the track listing and other info, and a really nice booklet that has a ton of awesome photos, posters and interviews. I’ve had some pretty lackluster, barebones new releases lately, so this was very much appreciated. The music speaks for itself: an incredible-sounding recording that makes it sound like you’ve been transported back in time and are sitting right there at the Penthouse in Seattle. It’s hard to highlight a specific track on here cause I kinda just like to take it in as the entire show but I love any version of Nardis and I also really enjoy Detour Ahead on the B side. The perfect soundtrack to a chilly winter evening. All around, a great release. If you’re a Bill Evans fan, this one is worth adding to your collection. That’s all for this week. I have some other records I’ve picked up over the last two months that I’m sure you’ll see me writing about here. Thanks for reading everyone. It feels good to be back!

Hello Sorry Staters. Welcome to 2026. It’s already getting a good start on being an even shittier year than 2025. Last year was an awful one for us, as most of you are aware. Grief over tragic loss is never an easy thing to deal with. To all of those who have sent us condolences and had us in their thoughts, we thank you.

It feels weird writing about anything these days with all that has happened and is going on in the world, particularly here in America. These are very troubled and scary times we are living in. It’s hard to enjoy anything when such terrible things are happening all around us. Music, film, TV, sport, you name it, all seems so trivial in comparison. The arts serve a purpose though, and often when times are tough, they come to the rescue when we need them most. Music in particular can heal, soothe, inspire and bring joy. It does for me. We just need to make sure we aren’t allowing “entertainment” to distract us from the fascist takeover that is going on around us. Perhaps we’ll see some serious music that speaks of the times we are in. That would be a good thing. Even pop music can be on the right side of history and let’s hope we see more pop, rock, country and hip-hop stars, among others, using their platform to promote positive messages and to make a stand against the evils of the world.

I thought for my first one of these this year I would try to write about something new, or relatively new. I know I am the king of the oldies around these parts, but every now and then I like to listen to new stuff. LoL. One band whose records I have been digging for the last year or so is Dry Cleaning. They come from London and are on 4AD. I liked their sophomore album Stumpwork, which came out at the end of 2022, and now to kick off 2026 they have a new one out called Secret Love.

The band formed prior to the pandemic and were on the brink of a breakthrough of sorts, but their momentum was halted, just like so many others, when the lockdown took effect. The group is built around a trio of musician friends who had all aged a little and taken full-time jobs and were only viewing playing music as a hobby when they began Dry Cleaning. However, when college arts lecturer Florence Shaw was asked to join them, things got serious quickly. Initially unsure about whether she was the right fit for the job, Shaw was encouraged to just recite her poetry and to talk about whatever came into her mind. It is this dry, talking style that she uses that makes the band different, and it makes them sound cooler than if she were attempting to sing instead. The music palette is that of post-punk. Fans of The Cool Greenhouse, another London group that formed around the same time, might find a lot to like in Dry Cleaning. Critics have bandied around phrases like, “imagine The Fall fronted by Annette Peacock” to describe their sound. They’ve been compared to Magazine also, and certainly on album opener Hit My Head All Day you can hear a nod to them in the guitar sounds, I think. Another name that comes to mind when trying to describe Dry Cleaning is Baxter Dury. Son of Ian, who has been putting out cool and interesting records for a couple of decades now. Those are all big artistic boots to fill for sure, but there is a bit of truth in that comparison. I love The Fall, naturally, and here at Sorry State we also have a lot of time for The Cool Greenhouse, so it was almost a forgone conclusion that Dry Cleaning would appeal to me, but judging by the critical praise the band is getting for this latest record, a lot of others feel the same. In fact, their label 4AD has re-released their debut album New Long Leg, along with a reissue of their first EPs to satisfy the increased interest in the band. Their popularity probably wasn’t hurt by opening up for Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds on that group’s 2024 arena tour. A good choice of support and I am sure many of those attending those shows became new fans.

For Secret Love, the producer’s chair was occupied by Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, whom they had befriended after a meeting in Chicago back in 2022, facilitated by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who was recording with Le Bon at his Loft studio there. Cate Le Bon is also credited with various synth and drum machine programming on the new record, and some recording was done in Chicago at The Loft, but they recorded most of the record in France. On this new album, their sound is like previous outings but slightly more polished and Shaw does sing here and there, mostly on choruses. I didn’t see a credit for anyone else providing back-up vocals, so I assume it is her voice we hear singing. Also, not a lot should be made of the dry, talking-singing thing really. It’s not exactly a new style. Go listen to Marlene Dietrich, Nico, Brigitte Fontaine, and Grace Jones, for more examples. Beat poets, jazz singers and rappers will tell you they’ve been doing it for a fair while also. It’s just a style, and it works well here.

If, like me, you are finding boppy, poppy, bubblegum music doesn’t quite fit the mood right now, then give Dry Cleaning a chance. Being on 4AD, their album art is also a big part of the package, and this one, like the last one, tells you that something might be a little different within. Check out Secret Love here.

Thanks for reading and for supporting music and our part in that.

Cheers - Dom

Alright, I guess it’s time to shake off the cobwebs and write my first staff pick in a couple of months. Do I still know how to do this? We’ll see, I suppose.

A couple of weeks ago we flipped the calendar over to 2026. In early January in years past, Jeff has always quoted Embrace’s song “End of a Year:” “It’s the end of a fucked up year… and there’s another one coming.” I’ve never stopped to think too much about that lyric until this year. While I had some great times in 2025, the latter half of the year was one of the most grueling times I’ve ever lived through. It truly was a fucked up year. And, as Ian said, there’s another one coming. No respite, no turning the clock back, just keep plowing ahead into the shit.

I was thinking the other day about how I haven’t heard the term “new year’s resolution” once this year. Admittedly, I’ve been doing my best to spend as little time as I can with both mass and social media, but I don’t think I’m that disconnected. My theory is that the world has grown so fucked up that no one has the energy to do anything but console ourselves about all the trauma we’ve endured. For the past few years, social media around the new year is a unified chorus of people exclaiming what a shit year it was, and virtually no one expressing hope the next year will be better, much less determination to make it so. I know that, in the past, I’ve dismissed most of the negativity I see about the state of the world as catastrophizing, or at the very least (foolishly) buying into the tendency in mainstream political discourse to treat every moment, every controversy, as THE MOST IMPORTANT CRISIS WE HAVE EVER FACED. But lately when I watch the news I see so much cruelty… so much evil. Our government in the United States is run by a coalition of gangsters, sadists, and people who are happy enough with whatever tiny piece of the pie they’re getting to remain complicit. I’ve always thought this was more or less true of national politics in the U.S., but there’s been a concerted effort in recent years to remove all good-hearted people from positions of power and replace them with the aforementioned gangsters, sadists, and stooges, right down to the humblest, smallest arms of local government. My mom works for the school system in the tiny town in Virginia where I grew up, and she’s told me about how a small group of right-wing activists have taken over the school board and enacted a regime that is basically the local equivalent of Stephen Miller’s wet dream. The world is getting worse, just about everywhere, for everyone but a tiny subset of people whose greed will never be satisfied.

I almost always stick to music in my pieces for the SSR newsletter, but I’ve been thinking about politics a lot lately… not Republican versus Democrat bs, but politics broadly defined, as in how we live together as humans and try to get along. Maybe I’m worried about losing my political compass without Red in my life. They were so passionate and so relentlessly empathetic, and I feel like they served as a bulwark against my natural tendency toward defeatism and apathy. But I also owe a lot of my thoughts about politics to being immersed in the world of Poison Girls for the past few weeks. Which leads me to my double staff pick for this week:

Poison Girls: Where’s the Pleasure 12” (Xntrix, 1982)

Rich Cross with Alec Dunn & Erin Yanke. This Is a Message to Persons Unknown: The Story of the Poison Girls book (PM Press, 2025)

While I’ve had Poison Girls records in my collection for many years, the band never truly clicked with me until I picked up a copy of their 1982 album Where’s the Pleasure sometime this fall. I can’t even remember where I got the record. It must have been during one of my trips out of town. Whenever I travel, and particularly when I travel alone, I tend to come home with a giant stack of vinyl, which I then spend the next few months going through. I did not know what I was in for when I dropped the needle on Where’s the Pleasure. First, it’s not what you would think of as an anarcho-punk record. Poison Girls had released several records by the time they recorded Where’s the Pleasure, and they’d long left behind any interest in catering to the middle of punk’s road. Where’s the Pleasurebuilds a world much wider than punk, taking in a range of styles across its thirteen tracks. The ones that first caught my ear—like the title track that begins the record—feature a crack rhythm section that lives deep in the pocket, and the album’s crystalline recording makes you feel like you’re plonked down in the middle of the studio as the band records. While Poison Girls’ connections to punk were fraying by this point, there’s still a punky sense of energy and directness, and I hear a lot of what I love about more “sophisticated” anarcho bands like Crisis and Zounds on Where’s the Pleasure.

The music pulled me in, but it wasn’t long before Vi Subversa’s lyrics captivated me. Subversa was 47 when Where’s the Pleasure came out, and I’m 46 now, so perhaps I’m in the right place in my life to appreciate where Vi was coming from. There are a few songs on Where’s the Pleasure that deal with “topical” issues: “Take the Toys” is, broadly, about war, while “Rio Disco Stink” is an invective against Rio Tinto, a multinational mining corporation with a long list of sins against the earth and humanity. But most of the songs on the album are about “personal” issues: love, romance, sex, aging, family… the stuff of human life rather than political broadsheets. And of course these “personal” and “political” issues intersect, which Vi has clearly thought about plenty. Take, for instance, the declamation in “Take the Toys (Reprise)”: “for all the money they spend on nuclear weapons, there is still not a safe and effective form of contraception.” Vi is an incredible lyricist, cuttingly direct one moment and oblique and evocative the next, and I am certain I’ll be pondering her words for the rest of my life.

Having been so blown away by Where’s the Pleasure, when I got an email announcing a Kickstarter / pre-order for a Poison Girls book on the long-running radical publishing imprint PM Press, I smashed that buy button without a second thought (and added in a “Take the Toys from the Boys” t-shirt for good measure). I just knew Poison Girls’ story was going to be riveting. I knew a few scattered facts that were intriguing—that Vi’s children were punks and had played in Fatal Microbes and Rubella Ballet, and that Poison Girls had frequently shared the stage with Crass—but listening to Where’s the Pleasure assured me whatever time I spent with Poison Girls, their art, and their story would be well-spent.

This Is a Message to Persons Unknown was all I could have wanted and more. As a punk rock book, it is top-notch. I love punk books, and the crisp graphic design and the reproduction of so much of the group’s paper ephemera—zines, flyers, photographs, press clippings, record sleeves and inserts, badges, and plenty more, all of it in vivid detail and full color—would have been enough to leave me a satisfied customer. But that’s only the beginning. The writing and editing are also top-notch… I try not to be an asshole about it, but as a former English teacher, the sloppy writing and copy editing on a lot of underground and small-press books really bug the shit out of me. Rich Cross’s research is exhaustive, but his writing is skillful enough not to lose the forest (the band’s story) in the trees (all those captivating details). The whole thing is executed to a much higher standard than any other book I can think of, even impressive ones like Crass: A Pictoral History.

And then there’s the story, which just blew my mind. I don’t want to summarize too much because this is already way too long, but my intuition that the Poison Girls were interesting characters was 100% accurate. And more than just being interesting, Poison Girls’ story is inspiring. The group’s key members—vocalist Vi Subversa, but also drummer Lance D’Boyle and guitarist Richard Famous—were dyed-in-the-wool radicals, people who looked at all the fucked up shit in the world and refused to take part. They didn’t just critique the world around them; they imagined how it could be better. And then they tried to make what they imagined a reality, despite an entire world working against them. They were human and had flaws and some things they tried worked out better than others, but they fucking tried. They had hope. The members of Crass found them so inspiring that, from January 1979 until early 1981, Crass refused to perform unless Poison Girls was also on the bill. Crass thought it was that important that their audience heard what Poison Girls had to say.

So yeah, Poison Girls has been my little island of hope in the sea of shit that was the latter half of 2025. I was honestly sad when I reached the last page of the book, but thankfully there are a bunch more Poison Girls records I haven’t yet spent enough time with. So at least I have something to look forward to as the world crumbles around us.