#demo 2023

[felopunk]

HUMAN - Very Fuckin Human DEMO 2023

[iamdangerace]

Friends’ new  band.

Listen/purchase: New Year New Demo by The Lowborn.

Little Jesse Dills

[aurademortt]

[dustedmagazine]

S.H.I.T. — Demo 2023 (Self-released)

Demo 2023 by S.H.I.T.

It’s pretty much impossible not to love a punk demo with covers of tunes by Crucifix and Blitz (fuck yes) holding up its back end. When the demo has been recorded by Toronto’s S.H.I.T., it’s no surprise that the rest of the songs are equally compelling, excoriating, ear-splitting and molar-grinding. The band’s sound remains trebly and raw, like a cascade of sparks off the blade of a pavement saw. High energy and propulsive, the EP’s eight minutes never slacken in their intensity, and Ryan Tong’s vocals — delivered shouts and gulps, clean by present standards — ride the chaos, as they have since the band’s first demo in 2012. Four songs aren’t enough, but every second thrills.

The cover of Blitz’s “Never Surrender” may be the most pleasurable 85 seconds on Demo 2023, but “Haunted,” one of S.H.I.T.’s originals, is its best song. The ferocity of “Haunted” gestures back to the year during which the Blitz tune originally emerged — in 1982, on a 7” from No Future Records in Worcestershire. But the S.H.I.T. song has a decidedly North American sensibility, akin to Intensified Chaos or M.I.A.’s early songs, with the same tinny, sprinting urgency. Those references to hardcore’s history echo some of the song’s more suggestive lyrics; Tong hollers, “A worn-out slogan / Dressed in archaic rags / Nostalgia brings death / The perpetual lag.” It’s hard to say what “slogan” and “rags” the song has in mind—exhausted political chants? Hardcore music’s formally hidebound approach to sound and song? The chorus is equally cryptic but somehow more emphatic: “Novel / New / All / The same.” 

Some punk records and some punk bands are suffused with the deadening, near-kitschy nostalgia Tong addresses — see the Exploited, who tour regularly as a cartoonish distortion of the band they once were, and who have not released any new music for about 20 years. But there are other ways of thinking and feeling the genre’s enduring qualities. To be sure, punk is a haunted form, seemingly unable and unwilling to shed the ghosts of its past. But punk can also be a spectre, the sort of revenant that Marx and Engels identified in that famous opening of The Communist Manifesto: a World Spirit long denied by capital and its managerial class. 

For punks young and older, it can feel a little hopeless, making and grooving to records amid economic and political orders that seem only to get worse, more venal, more brutal. In the face of that misery and cynicism, “Never Surrender” and “Haunted” and the rest of Demo 2023 feel vital, needed and very much alive. 

Jonathan Shaw