Record of the week: naked roommate: Pass the loofah LP

Naked Roommate: Pass The Loofah 12" (Trouble in Mind Records Pass the Loofah is the second proper album from this Bay Area group. Naked Roommate originally spun off from a band called the World, whose 2019 record Reddish remains one of my most-played records of the 2010s. While the World was an earthy, organic-sounding group with deep sonic roots in the early Rough Trade Records discography, Naked Roommate’s sound leans into early 80s electronic beats and synthesizer pulses, albeit still laced with the irreverent lyricism, forward-thinking artistry, and comfy DIY aesthetic the World leaned on. But what strikes me most about Pass the Loofah isn’t the aesthetic, but the craftsmanship and artistry I hear on the album. So much music today is made for short attention spans and instant disposal, focusing too much on surface-level aesthetics rather than crafting songs with strong bones. Pass the Loofah bucks this trend with a substantial 41-minute runtime that takes the listener through a range of unique landscapes, an epic journey rather than a toe dipped into a diluted, lukewarm bath. For me, one of Naked Roommate’s strengths is that they never decide whether they’re a dance band, a pop group, or an art project. Tracks like “No Kicker” and “Bus” have tough, danceable rhythms from the 99 Records / ESG school, but while the beats take center stage, the songs are stacked with memorable hooks, like the chorus refrain of “we take the bus” or “Reasons Why,” where the chorus of “that’s whyyyyyyyyy… I looooooove you” cleverly subverts the unromantic mundanity in the verse imagery. And these pop moments go down all the more smoothly because they’re cut with so much art school roughage. A standout in this vein is “Successful Friend,” a funky, Talking Heads-esque track with great lyrics, my favorite being “among your many successes (…) is having your designs printed on pajamas across the world!,” a line that’s bound to bring a smile to the face of any Uranium Club or Cool Greenhouse fan. Even further out are the album’s three instrumental tracks—including the Neu!-ish “Ducky & Viv” and the electric-era Miles Davis-channeling “G-Y pt. 2”—which are among my favorite on the album. There’s so much variety on Pass the Loofah, and not only does nothing feel redundant, but as you’re listening the record seems to spiral ever-upward, each song reaching new heights. The experience culminates with “I Can’t Be Found,” a soft landing that reminds me of the way Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets closes with its title track. Typically, a good record is one I want to play again as soon as it’s over, but Pass the Loofah’s wider scope and ambition leave me wanting to sit in silence and process what I’ve heard, a sign that I’ve consumed a substantial piece of art rather than just a bunch of instantly gratifying empty musical calories.

Naked Roommate: Pass The Loofah 12"
Regular price
$20.00
Sale price
$20.00

Featured Releases: November 4, 2024

Guiding Light: S/T cassette (Down South Tapes) The cassette label Stucco (and its many sub-labels like Impotent Fetus and Down South Tapes) has been bringing us some of the most creative and exciting music from the hardcore-adjacent underground for the past several years, and their latest from Texas’s Guiding Light is one of my favorite releases yet on what has become one of my favorite current labels. Guiding Light’s sound is difficult to pin down. Broadly, I’d put them in the tradition of forward-thinking, progressive hardcore bands like the early Meat Puppets and Saccharine Trust, but if you come to these five songs looking for an homage to a certain band or era, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, Guiding Light has firmly established their own voice, built around furious hardcore drumming, propulsive bass playing that isn’t afraid of melody, distant, mannered vocals that alternate between German (I think?) and English, and a brilliant guitarist who sounds like Johnny Marr trying to squeeze himself into an early 80s Midwest hardcore band. While the overall sound is definitely hardcore, it’s a brand of hardcore I’ve never heard before, and one that belongs entirely to Guiding Light. Even more impressive is the way Guiding Light explores their sound over these five tracks, showing how fertile their peculiar chemistry can be. While the opening track, “Sterb Doch,” leans into an artsy aggression that makes me think of Essential Logic, mellower moments in “Lost in Voices” and “Simmen” have a sun-bleached , Southwestern vibe that actually sounds a bit like the Meat Puppets. These adventurous songs—particularly with their rough, analog-sounding production—remind me of the creative explosion of UKDIY, but the more aggressive aspects are bound to alienate the modern iteration of that scene. On the other hand, Guiding Light is a fucking weird hardcore band; like the bands I mentioned at the top of this description, though their music sounds like hardcore, they do not feel like a hardcore band, but a band whose different paths intersect with hardcore’s extremes of tempo and volume. But for someone like me who loves the Raincoats and Mecht Mensch in equal measure, this tape is pure gold.

Alambrada: Ríos De Sangre 12” (Unlawful Assembly Records) Ríos de Sangre, the debut LP from Bogotá, Colombia’s Alambrada, arrived earlier this summer in a small edition that disappeared instantly, and now that we have a restock in-house, I wanted to hip anyone who might have missed out on this monster record the first go-round. While displaying the trademark intensity we expect from the contemporary Bogotá hardcore scene, Ríos de Sangre fits with a particular strain of hardcore I’ve often championed at Sorry State. I don’t think there’s a name for this sub-scene, but I think of it as true psycho shit, bands that play at ridiculously fast tempos, cramming their songs to overflowing with musical ideas and whose unbalanced, evil-sounding vibe borrows from the outsider hardcore canon of Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers, Spike in Vain, and Septic Death. Allergic to safety of convention, this is music that keeps the listener off-balance through a carpet-bomb deployment of odd rhythms and whiplash tempo changes. Incredibly, Alambrada keeps up the intensity across this record’s entire 20 minutes, not only abandoning hardcore’s genre-wide conventions, but rigorously avoiding repeating themselves or falling into their own patterns that might deaden the impact of their constant jump scares. It would take longer to catalog Alambrada’s seemingly endless bag of tricks than it would to actually listen to Ríos de Sangre, but even the final quarter of the album feels full of surprises, like the exceptional Buzzcocks-esque guitar solo in “Silencio Sepulcral” or when the drummer finally does a full-on blast on “Rabia.” It’s a wild ride, and like similarly over-the-top recent records from Psico Galera and Idiota Civilizzato, these twelve tracks will crank your heart up to hummingbird tempo and not let you rest until they hit the last note.

Bottled Violent: No Rules 7” (No Norms Records) No Norms Records brings us the vinyl debut from this hardcore band from Bandung, Indonesia. While Bottled Violent is from Southeast Asia, their sound draws most explicitly from early 80s US hardcore, with hyperactive rhythms, shouted vocals, and a thin and scratchy guitar sound that marks them as sonic allies of 2000s bands like Regulations, Social Circkle, and School Jerks. Like those bands, Bottled Violent’s decision to keep the distortion in check prevents their simple and catchy riffs from getting subsumed into an inchoate roar, but my favorite part of No Rules is how youthful it sounds. The riffs are dead simple, the band is slightly sloppy, and the production isn’t 100% dialed in, but while it’s easy to dismiss these things as shortcomings, it’s precisely these aspects that communicate Bottled Violent’s infectious enthusiasm… they’re just so stoked on hardcore that they’re making it happen and not sweating the details too much. And in a scene full of 30- and 40-something bands who are so good at what they do and so self-aware as to sound sterile, No Rules sounds refreshingly like a hardcore punk record and not a simulacrum of one.

Closetalkers: Path to Peace 7” (Neon Taste Records) Neon Taste brings us the debut vinyl from this three-piece hardcore band from Calgary, Canada. While the label describes Closetalkers as d-beat, I don’t hear much Discharge in their sound, except in the roaring maximalism of the production and the sense of menace that pervades these six tracks, which also makes me think of creepy mid-80s Japanese bands. The riffs are catchy (just on the verge of melodic, in fact), relying primarily on furious downstrokes that make me think of S.H.I.T. or Blazing Eye. Closetalkers’ secret weapon, though, is their drummer. The guitarist’s furious downstrokes hold down the driving rhythm, freeing the drummer to pack these songs full of inventive rhythms, creative fills, and unexpected accents. Closetalkers are ripping enough to grab you within a few seconds, but as these songs sink in, you’ll realize there’s a lot more going on than you might notice at first.

Sorry state newsletter: November 4, 2024

This week we have new pre-orders from two of our favorites, Straw Man Army and Paranoid, a totally brilliant Record of the Week from Naked Roommate, a bunch of our normal malarky, and the long-awaited return of the Featured Releases section.

Click here to read it.

straw man army's earthworks available for pre-order

NYC duo Straw Man Army return with their third LP, “Earthworks”, to complete a trilogy of records begun with 2020’s “Age of Exile,” and 2022’s “SOS”. Whereas “Age of Exile” dealt with the haunted landscapes of colonial history in the Americas, and “SOS” gave voice to a crisis of the present moment, like a prayer in bewildering times, 2024’s “Earthworks” signals the band’s attempt to close this trilogy by turning their gaze towards the future, where paradox, complexity and contradiction spiral in ascendance to an agonizing pitch. While continuing to develop their own style of anarcho-punk, “Earthworks” finds the band pulling once again from jazz and ambient influences, expanded Krautrock rhythms, and post-rock experiments, with a stronger emphasis on melodic vocals and varied song structures than on previous offerings. Taking cues from the wistful anti-war harmonies of The Byrds and the angry melodies of Zounds, tracks like “Turn the Wheel” and “Second Nature” mark new territory for a group whose messages and methods of experimentation have merged to form a singular sound equally at home on All the Madmen Records or in the spiritual legacy of ESP Disk. “Earthworks” is an album that holds and subverts many contradictions—juggling the weight of melancholy, grief, guilt, impunity, and the yearning for clarity against the backdrop of boiling wrath; the wrath of nature, the occupied, the dispossessed, and of the mind against itself. To quote the track “Spiral” — “Is this all that’s left for us these days? / Apathy and rage?”— Straw Man Army offers this record as a companion to our frustration, our sickness, our despair, and a lifeline for our fugitive attention in the struggle for peace.

Straw Man Army: Earth Works 12" (PRE-ORDER)
Regular price
$22.00
Sale price
$22.00

偏執症者 (Paranoid): MMXXII 5×7" box set up for pre-order

Sorry State exclusive pressing on white vinyl, limited to 100 copies.

This box compiles the singles released digitally only during 2022, now making them available in physical format for the first time. Also included, exclusively for this box, is an additional fifth single entitled "Nightmare", three new and unreleased tracks recorded during the same sessions, not to be sold separately. Including a guest appearance by the one and only Tadzio of Golpe.

Box set contains:

- Kill the Light, 7"
- Vanished Resilience, 7"
- Possessed, 7"
- The Great Reset, 7"
- Nightmare, 7" (exclusively for the box set)
- Fold out poster, 36x54cm
- Insert
- Postcard
- Sticker

偏執症者 (Paranoid): MMXXII 5×7" box set (PRE-ORDER)
Regular price
$85.00
Sale price
$85.00

New and Recommended Punk & Hardcore Ragers!

  • Loosey: Winter Promo '23 12"
    Regular price
    $22.00
    Sale price
    $22.00
  • Alement: Banished Sphere 12"
    Regular price
    $23.00
    Sale price
    $23.00
  • Brower: Flour 12"
    Vendor
    Dig! Records
    Regular price
    $20.00
    Sale price
    $20.00
  • Mob 47: Tills Du Dor 12"
    Regular price
    $30.00
    Sale price
    $30.00
  • SOH: Cost to Live 12"
    Regular price
    $18.00
    Sale price
    $18.00
  • Closetalkers: Path to Peace 7"
    Vendor
    Neon Taste
    Regular price
    $10.00
    Sale price
    $10.00
  • Smog / Electric Masochist: Split 12"
    Regular price
    $20.00
    Sale price
    $20.00
  • DE()T: Think Of Your Future 12"
    Vendor
    Simp Records
    Regular price
    $20.00
    Sale price
    $20.00

zorn's endless funeral 12" out now on sorry state

Philadelphia metal-punks Zorn return with the new 5-track EP Endless Funeral, their first new material since 2023’s head-turning debut LP on Sorry State. Endless Funeral ups the ante on Zorn’s previous releases in nearly every way, with more brutality, more musicality, and more theatricality. Zorn’s unique blend of metal and punk continues to pull from a wide swath of influences, whether it’s the brutal death metal riff on the opening track, “Warpath,” the epic mosh part in “G.O.R.N.,” the charging d-beat of “Drunken Demon” and “Dance of Madness,” and even the neoclassical shred guitar of the title track, a standout moment from recent live sets finally immortalized on vinyl. Atop the instrumental melee, vocals howl like an army of banshees let loose from hellish containment, their idiosyncratic rhythms skittering wildly across the instruments’ lock-step pummeling. Summoning both the chaos and the power of Zorn’s legendary live sets, Endless Funeral will leave you bruised, bloody, spent, and loving every second of it.

Zorn: Endless Funeral 12"
Regular price
$18.00
Sale price
$18.00

new arrivals

  • Wormrot: Left to Rot 12" (indie exclusive)
    Regular price
    $35.00
    Sale price
    $35.00
  • Johnny Winter: About Blues 12" (indie exclusive)
    Vendor
    Janus Records
    Regular price
    $28.00
    Sale price
    $28.00
  • The Chambers Brothers: Now! 12" (indie exclusive)
    Vendor
    Vault Records
    Regular price
    $29.00
    Sale price
    $29.00
  • Morbid Angel: Altars of Madness 12" (indie exclusive)
    Regular price
    $35.00
    Sale price
    $35.00
  • Raven: Back to Ohio Blues 12"
    Regular price
    $32.00
    Sale price
    $32.00
  • The Latin Dogs: Warning! 7"
    Regular price
    $15.00
    Sale price
    $15.00
  • Wednesday: Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up 12"
    Vendor
    Orindal
    Regular price
    $25.00
    Sale price
    $25.00
  • Neon Nightmare: Faded Dream 12"
    Vendor
    20 Buck Spin
    Regular price
    $28.00
    Sale price
    $28.00
  • Immortal Bird: Sin Querencia 12"
    Vendor
    20 Buck Spin
    Regular price
    $28.00
    Sale price
    $28.00
  • Pinhead Gunpowder: UNT 12"
    Regular price
    $28.00
    Sale price
    $28.00

latest used items

  • Peter Hammill: In Camera 12"
    Vendor
    used
    Regular price
    $15.00
    Sale price
    $15.00
  • Human Expression: A Love At A Psychedelic Velocity 12"
    Vendor
    used
    Regular price
    $75.00
    Sale price
    $75.00
  • Peter Hammill: Chameleon In The Shadow Of The Night 12"
    Vendor
    used
    Regular price
    $25.00
    Sale price
    $25.00
  • Two Door Cinema Club: Tourist History 12"
    Vendor
    used
    Regular price
    $90.00
    Sale price
    $90.00
  • PFM: Jet Lag 12"
    Vendor
    used
    Regular price
    $10.00
    Sale price
    $10.00

new on la vida es un mus

Second Death: S/T 12" (PRE-ORDER)
Regular price
$25.00
Sale price
$25.00
Tube Alloys: Evil Angels / Wizard Kingdom 7"
Regular price
$10.00
Sale price
$10.00
Rudimentary Peni: Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric 12" (PRE-ORDER)
Regular price
$29.00
Sale price
$29.00
Chain Cult: Harm Reduction 12"
Regular price
$25.00
Sale price
$25.00

recently restocked

  • DDT: Brave New World 7"
    Regular price
    $15.00
    Sale price
    $15.00
  • The Zeros: Don't Push Me Around 12"
    Regular price
    $35.00
    Sale price
    $35.00
  • Sub Verse / Sole Sister / Petticoats: Scaling Triangles 12"
    Vendor
    Zaius
    Regular price
    $25.00
    Sale price
    $25.00
  • Mirage: Legato Alla Rovina 12"
    Regular price
    $20.00
    Sale price
    $20.00
  • Chain Whip: Call Of The Knife 12"
    Regular price
    $20.00
    Sale price
    $20.00

Recommended Reissues

  • M.I.A.: Murder in a Foreign Place 12" (40th Anniversary)
    Regular price
    $28.00
    Sale price
    $28.00
  • Morbid Humour: S/T 12"
    Regular price
    $25.00
    Sale price
    $25.00
  • Various: We Can't Help It If We're From Florida 10"
    Regular price
    $20.00
    Sale price
    $20.00
  • Brutal Truth: Extreme Conditions 12" (Indie Exclusive)
    Regular price
    $35.00
    Sale price
    $35.00
  • Detestation: Singles, Splits, etc. Collection 12"
    Vendor
    Havoc Records
    Regular price
    $16.00
    Sale price
    $16.00
  • Detestation: S/T 12"
    Vendor
    Havoc Records
    Regular price
    $16.00
    Sale price
    $16.00
  • Swankys: The Very Best of Hero 12"
    Regular price
    $29.00
    Sale price
    $29.00
  • Various: Hardcore Unlawful Assembly 12" (PRE-ORDER)
    Vendor
    MCR Company
    Regular price
    $32.00
    Sale price
    $32.00

new on sorry state

Lasso: Parte 12"
Regular price
$20.00
Sale price
$20.00
Golpe: Subisci. Conformati. Rassegnati. 7"
Regular price
$9.00
Sale price
$9.00
Zorn: S/T 12"
Regular price
$18.00
Sale price
$18.00
Personal Damage: Violent Ritual 7"
Regular price
$8.00
Sale price
$8.00

Recommended books, zines, and other reads

  • Roger Miret: Agnostic Front - With Time: The Roger Miret Archives book (PRE-ORDER)
    Regular price
    $69.00
    Sale price
    $69.00
  • Weird Music That Goes on Forever: A Punk's Guide to Loving Jazz book
    Regular price
    $18.00
    Sale price
    $18.00
  • Råpunk: The Birth of Swedish Hardcore 1981-89 book
    Vendor
    No Good
    Regular price
    $55.00
    Sale price
    $55.00
  • Crude Sense: Issue #1 zine
    Vendor
    zines
    Regular price
    $15.00
    Sale price
    $15.00

Who We Are and What We Do

Sorry State Records has the best selection of DIY punk and hardcore vinyl in the world, with well over 2,500 unique titles currently in stock. We're a great music discovery tool, with blogs and other features to help you discover great new music you'll love. We have the fastest, most professional mail order service in punk, with most orders shipping within 24 hours. We're also a great brick-and-mortar record shop based in Raleigh, NC, specializing in collectible and hard to find titles in all genres.

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