I hadn’t spent much time in Oakland over the years but K had. We used to gently rib each other about our different preferences for Bay Area locales, with her decidedly in the East Bay camp. We were in town for a series of protests held by the Occupy Oakland family and were just walking around the city, making our way toward Oscar Grant Park.

Around 19th and Broadway, we found ourselves stopped at the intersection waiting to cross the street — on the other side I saw him. Not certain at first, wanting to get a closer look, I turned my normal quick step across the road into a slow shuffle to give me more time.

As we approached each other I knew I was right — it was him. Holy shit, it was him. I went quiet, a cold sweat flashed across my skin. We made eye contact, my eyes widened, his narrowed. I went to say something and no sound would come from my mouth, and the look he gave me made it seem like that may have been the preferred option.

We made it across the street and stopped. K looked at me.

“Are you ok?” she said, clearly a little concerned.

“Do you know who we just walked past?” I said, still trying to get my heart rate back down.

“Um, no… should I?” she asked, moving from concerned to confused.

“That was Boots Riley,” I said, exasperated.

“Who’s Boots Riley?” she said back to me.

And for too many people, that is exactly the question.

Frontman of the legendary hip hop outfit The Coup, political provocateur of the highest order, accomplished film director — do I need to continue? Well I shall. Lead vocalist of the supergroup Street Sweeper Social Club. I chafe a little at calling them a supergroup — I feel one needs to have reached a certain level of cultural saturation to earn that label. That said, take Boots Riley, add in Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, and forget supergroup — you’ve got an awesomegroup. Two of the most electrifyingly political artists playing today decided to join up like some left wing, socially progressive Justice League? Fuck yes.

As the legend goes, Morello scooped Riley up one night and took him to a cheap Brazilian dinner and told him “we’re in a band together, it’s called Street Sweeper Social Club, it’s going to be revolutionary party jams.” Then Morello did the most Morello thing ever — he handed Riley a cassette filled with musical ideas. This was 2009. Who the hell had a tape deck at that point?

No matter — they made it work, serving as the opening act on Nine Inch Nails’ 2009 tour featuring Jane’s Addiction, and that same year released their one and only full-length record, an eponymous offering featuring their first single, “100 Little Curses.”

This album is everything you’d expect from these two titans of social commentary. Morello lays down his trademark crunch-funk guitar that rivals anything he did with Rage, while Riley serves up political commentary not for the faint of heart. I wonder if they realized how far ahead of their time they actually were.

This is the music we needed in 2016 and more importantly the music we need right now. At its best, music inspires something in you — stirs you to action, whether that’s picking up a guitar or a Molotov. Woody Guthrie famously had “This Machine Kills Fascists” written on his guitar and I see no hyperbole in the statement. Just earlier this year you would have found me complaining that the kids were letting things slide, that there was no protest music, no social commentary. Boy was I wrong — I’ll let that bad idea fall by the wayside while bringing you back to Street Sweeper Social Club.

Yes, the kids are making great music that genuinely has something to say, but many of them are still in the finding-their-voice stage. Not so Riley, Morello and crew — they’ve been around the block a time or two, seen a thing or two, and have the scars to prove it.

Opening the album, “Fight! Smash! Win!” is trademark Morello — spiraling guitar that explodes into a driving, funk-as-fuck bass line setting up Riley’s lyrical attack. He means it when he says if you’ve got a blacklist, he wants to be on it. “100 Little Curses” is the wished-upon death by a hundred paper cuts that anyone who’s ever struggled to pay rent levels at the moneyed class. Not death per se — but until we make the revolution, we all hope your life sucks ass.

“Clap for the Killers” is probably the most aggressively raw track on the album, with Boots pulling absolutely no punches while zeroing in on his target with pinpoint accuracy. Before you get your knickers in a twist worried we’re glorifying murderers, go pull the liner notes and read the lyrics — you’re welcome. Music custom made for a protest that doubles as a party, because at the end of the day if you can’t have a little fun while bringing forth the downfall of our capitalist, patriarchal society, what’s even the point?

Then we get to “Promenade” — a throwdown funk number with a pulsating bass line that would be just as comfortable in an underground dance club as it is on the protest streets. While Morello is busy doing the things only Morello can do to a guitar, Riley makes his stance clear — till everyone is fed, till everyone has a bed, his skin is black, his star red.

The ‘60s had “We Shall Overcome” and the likes as the soundtrack to their movement. While appropriate for the times, might I suggest it lacks a bit of the fire and intensity the times we live in today demand? So my plea to any of you leaning a bit to the left who still see value in the street protest — perhaps while you’re building the mixtape to get folks amped up and ready to go, include a few tracks from Street Sweeper Social Club. Oh fuck that, just play the whole damn thing and we’ll have a riot on our hands. And if the debut leaves you wanting more, find the Ghetto Blaster EP. Their version of “Paper Planes” alone is worth the hunt.

K and I finally made it to Oscar Grant Park and started milling about. Given the history Occupy Oakland had already had with the Oakland Police Department, folks were a little standoffish with us at first. But we sat, we listened, we talked about the work we’d done with Occupy San Diego, our connections to the Bay Area, and soon enough folks started warming up to us — just in time for things to turn into a truly wild and harrowing night.

Slipping past a police barricade as they worked to kettle the protest, K and I made it back to our car, exhausted, slightly beat up and exhilarated. This was being alive. This was standing up for something when there were consequences attached.

Scrubbing the phone numbers off our arms — written in black Sharpie — I looked over at K.

“Damn, Oakland knows how to bring the fight... maybe you’re on to something with this whole East Bay love thing,” I said, as a nervous laugh escaped me, part relief, part dissipation of adrenaline.

A wicked grin spread across her face. “And you doubted me…”

How does one of the most influential albums of the early post-punk era remain one of the most current records coming into 2026, just one year shy of its 50th anniversary? Clocking in at a mere 35 minutes, the 21 tracks that make up this album mark it as one of the most brutally efficient punk albums ever made.

BUT.

Drop the needle on Wire’s 1977 debut release Pink Flag and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s something TikTok-ready in the vein of Fontaines D.C. or IDLES.

Many moons ago I was talking to my friend Alex about literature. This was extremely convenient as we were hanging out at a bookstore in San Francisco. Borderlands Books to be exact — before they moved into the Mission District, they called 534 Laguna Street home in the heart of the Hayes Valley neighborhood. Alex was one of those stupid smart people who said insightful, witty things without even realizing she was doing so.

“No one’s ever read Finnegans Wake,” she says to me.

I’m not much of a Joyce fan but I am both struck by this statement and doing my best to spend some time in Alex’s bedroom, so I find her eyes and ask her to tell me more.

“I take that back,” she says as she leans in, her low-cut shirt falling X-rated low but her eyes locked on mine daring me to break the gaze. “Something like ten people in the whole world have actually made it through Finnegans Wake. It is so insufferable, so difficult that everyone the world over just decided to take those masochists’ word for it and parrot it. So, ten people in the whole world have actually read the damn thing while everyone claims to have while parroting what they said.”

Have you ever listened to Wire? Oh, you have? Tell me more.

Everyone has listened to Wire and yet near no one has heard them. Ok, hold on, let me back that statement up because it’s not entirely accurate. Michael Stipe and Co. have heard them — just go listen to early REM. Elastica has heard them — Three Girl Rhumba was lifted directly for Connection (settled out of court, by the way). Most of the major players in the east coast punk scene — Minor Threat, Mission of Burma, Sonic Youth — have heard them and on and on and on. It would be quaint to say they were a band’s band. No — these motherfuckers rocked as hard as anything Detroit had hitting the street around the same time and beat the pants off anything coming from the eastern shores of the Atlantic.

And yet.

“We’re the most famous band you’ve never heard of,” Wire’s lead singer Colin Newman once said. “Our fans assume that Wire is massive — like, we’ve all got mansions. And then there are lots of people who know groups who are more successful than Wire who’ve been influenced by Wire — yet they’ve never heard of Wire. It’s a very strange kind of fame.”

Perhaps it is exactly that strange sort of fame that has allowed Wire to continue all these years, notching 17 studio albums on their belt. Fame is a fickle mistress. We’re all too familiar with the story of the small-time band that found success only to succumb to its demands — 27 Club, anyone? No one in Wire committed suicide so perhaps it’s more appropriate to view them alongside their London peers, the Sex Pistols, who self-destructed just three years after forming — cultural icons to be sure — but only one studio album to their name. The Pistols sought the spotlight and it consumed them. Wire avoided it and survived.

Walking up Fell Street toward my Scott Street apartment, my thoughts drifted from literature to music, specifically to Wire. My journey to the seminal band started with that Elastica lawsuit. Absolutely loving the song at the time and having no idea who that other band was, I dug in and found them. The more you listened, the more you found and I started hearing their influence in everything. Cutting across Alamo Square, I sat down on a bench, lit a cigarette and soaked in The City. I couldn’t have known then what I’d already figured out about the band. There was a shift in the vibe, a feeling in the air — far fewer Burning Man cars on the side streets, more Audis … something was changing. Over the years San Francisco has been its own headwaters to various cultures that ebbed and flowed with the current — what happens when someone dams the river?

No one knows when you’ll give your lover their last kiss, when you’ll hold them in your arms for one final embrace. The moment never announces itself — it just grinds on like an apathetic god who’s tired of your shit and just wants to get on with things. When I moved to San Francisco in the late ‘90s it was still alive. Bands like Storm Large were playing in local venues across the bay and Jill Tracy was holding her cabaret performance at Café du Nord where my dear friends got married. Silicon Valley money came in, rents skyrocketed, artists moved out — sorry, Portland. Everything became polos and khakis. Niche bookstores got evicted. Internet startups moved in. Where once funk and groove filled restaurants the new sound had a decidedly more adult contemporary, more Dave Matthews sound. I get back to the city often and I don’t recognize it — most of my touch points from that era are gone. At one point, I thought the old Borderlands Books building was gone. Alex tells me it’s still standing. I drive back to The City — sure enough, there it is, new paint, new façade, everything around it different due to the new Highway 101 on-ramp.

I call the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Sonora, California home. Working for the Forest Service, my job gets me outside a lot. On occasion I’ll find myself at Leavitt Peak at the headwaters of the Stanislaus River. Wire is the source, a place so few visit but so many drink of its waters.

You come here because it represents something more than the parts. Because you are the type of listener who wants to understand. Who isn’t content to gloss over the footnotes in a biography or an obtuse reference in a liner note. You want to dig, you want to go exploring a Sierra Nevada mountain. I’m not going to tell you what they sound like. That’s for you to decide. I’m not going to tell you that you should embrace them. That’s for you to decide. I’m not going to tell you they should be in your collection. That’s for you to decide.

You don’t come to the headwaters because you’re thirsty. The headwaters are pilgrimage — they’re Mecca. I don’t want to tell you that you should listen to Wire. I simply want to hand you a prayer rug, point in the general direction and hope you find it within yourself to make the journey.

For this is Wire — too abrasive for pop, too minimal for punk, too English for American rock. Too influential to be obscure, too obscure to be canonical. The band that built the house that everyone else lives in without ever quite living in it themselves. Still making records in 2026. Still not fitting anywhere. Still sounding more current than bands a third their age.

So how does a nearly 50-year-old album remain so relevant? Because the headwaters always are. Whether you choose to acknowledge them or not, they don’t care. They just are. They’re there should you decide to make the trip but their glory doesn’t fade, their majesty isn’t diminished with the passing years. They will continue to sustain future generations who make the sojourn. Running just beneath the surface, they will sustain everything.

Alex rolled out of bed, her naked body silhouetted by the streetlights, and opened the window letting the cool bay wind into the room. Lighting a cigarette, I pass her one and light one for myself, reaching over to the bedside table for the whiskey and soda that started this evening. Pink Flag was what we’d been listening to that night as we talked about books, politics and the state of “The City” — a topic near and dear to both of us as the century worked its way to a flip.

“I really think the San Francisco I know is more like Wire,” she says, a long plume of smoke exhaling from her as she slides back into bed next to me.

“Tell me more about that,” I say with a strong idea of where she’s going but wanting desperately for this night to never end.

“Well, everyone has this idea of San Francisco. They’re wrong. This city is grit — it’s the weirdos and the crazies and the lovelies all trying to find their way in the most glorious way possible but no one’s paying attention to the work, only the end product.”

She pauses, takes a drag from the American Spirit pursed between her lips and pushes the smoke into the room and continues.

“Some Silicon Valley twat is gonna come along and take that end product and turn it into the next big thing and not … even for a moment … acknowledge the gutter punk and flat squatter who brought it forward.”

I pull her close, her skin is warm against mine. We wrap our legs around each other and I tuck her hair behind her ear.

“Too much fucking Dave Matthews and not enough Wire,” she says, our lips connect and the night slips away.

Listen to their first studio album beginning to end and you quickly realize Die Spitz turned the idea of something to consume into a weapon. In a day and age built for algorithms, built for one-minute TikTok clips, Something to Consume exists as a whole — a deliberate act of subversion. To remove any single track from the album would degrade it — shut your mouth, show your face, American Porn.

The foursome put the jet-black, souped-up muscle car into gear — think Stephen King’s Christine — shifting to drive with the opening number, “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay)”, refusing to take their foot off the gas until the last sonic entry, “A Strange Moon/Selenophilia,” finally allows you to catch your breath. Melding punk, metal, and grunge into something uniquely theirs, the feral intensity of the album drips with rage at a late-stage capitalist society that finds the four wanting something to fill the void.

Most reviews of Something to Consume have drawn comparisons to Hole. It’s a fair line to draw but stop there and you haven’t done the work of actually listening to what’s in front of you. Both bands are drawing from a deep well where torrents of rage and the specific textures of feminine fury get channeled through an electric guitar. Patti Smith, Kathleen Hanna, PJ Harvey, Kim Gordon — they’re all in that water. The well predates Hole and will outlive them all. Courtney Love just got there first in a way the mainstream couldn’t ignore.

All wells are simply veins into deeper aquifers and deep in the well Die Spitz is drawing from you’ll find Black Sabbath, the Pixies, Mudhoney, Mazzy Star, Deftones, and Nirvana — all points of reference for a generation that came of age when so much of rock’s storied history was already behind them, the future still to be written. The future of this band began in Texas.

Eleanor (Ellie) Livingston and Ava Schrobilgen, friends since preschool, split vocal duties with both women playing guitar. They met Kate Halter in middle school wrapping her into the fold. Kate learned to play bass specifically to start the band — something the women have described as a way to spend more time together during Covid lockdowns.

But something was still missing. The thing coming out of their amps wasn’t matching what was in their heads.

“We were missing a piece,” says Ellie. “We wanted a drummer, someone who could help convey the heavy sound we wanted to achieve. We only had about 1 or 2 friends outside of each other at the time. We were then gifted by the grace of God (our friend Molly from the Austin band Sludge) who let us borrow her absolute machine of a drummer (Chloe). This was the piece we had missed; with her added, Die Spitz became a reality. We’d always had the energy and the motivation, and after the puzzle piece fit, with hours of practicing Sabbath riffs and scales, we were able to get the sound,” they said in an interview with Austin’s KUTX.

The thing is this — go into Something to Consume armed with anything I’ve written, or the words of any other writer who’s covered this album, and you will fall into a trap. Every reference point, every signpost, every name-dropped influence becomes a lens that distorts more than it clarifies. I know because I did it. First listen I was playing whack-a-band with every track, pegging an identity only to have the next song blow it apart. By the third listen I finally understood what was required: Shoshin — the Zen concept of the beginner’s mind. Set down everything you think you know and just hear the band as the band.

Do that and Something to Consume will reward you. Yes, the influences are all there. But it took Ava, Ellie, Kate and Chloe — their specific history, their particular set of circumstances, the years of friendship before a note was ever recorded — to make the whole something greater than the sum of its parts. That alchemy belongs to them alone.

So, if you’re following along, at this point you’ve stopped reading and just put the album on. No seriously, go do that.

No? Still here? Ok.

Good players in a game will tell you exactly what they’re about to do with varying degrees of success. Armed with the information you feel prepared to put up a reasonable defense — you know what’s coming, right? The best players tell you what they’re about to do and then go ahead and do it successfully anyway. So it is with Die Spitz. The album opens with “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay).” You know what’s coming, you’re ready — until around the one-minute mark when the song takes a hard left and your whole game plan is upended.

I warned you.

The slow burn of the opening lures you in, the haunting, almost yearning vocals lull you into a false sense of serenity as the jangly guitars promise comfort and familiarity. Then the bomb goes off. The yearning vocal turns into a fierce growl, the comforting guitars shift to a metal riff that blows your hair back.

And that’s just the setup.

“Throw Yourself to the Sword,” with its Slayer-like riff, is the battle cry. This is the album’s barn burner with the band holding the drip torches, the mixture set to burn hot. With her lyrics barked as much as sung, Ellie absolutely dares you to fuck with her — there will be consequences.

“American Porn” arrives with a wink-and-a-nod title, immediately feeling at home in an early nineties Seattle bar alongside Bleach, Facelift and Superfuzz Bigmuff on the tabletop jukebox. Pulling another switcheroo, Ava takes the vocal lead, channeling Kurt Cobain in her wail. The similarity doesn’t end there — “American Porn” takes on influencer culture the same way Cobain addressed it with “In Bloom.” There’s always been someone willing to sell their soul for fifteen minutes of fame. The names may have changed. The game hasn’t.

Catch your breath. We’re not done here.

Chloe opens “Sound to No One” and lays down a foundational beat built upon layer by layer until Ellie hauntingly comes in over a crunchy, maddening, heavy riff that repeats and resolves into a dream sequence of a bridge — threatening to bring you back down to earth. Which it does, only for you to realize you’re about to be burned alive upon reentry as the intensity ratchets right back up.

Something to Consume is as much a manifesto as it is a thesis. If it has a message, it’s this: We’re here to rock hard. We’re going to have a damn good time doing it with these people for as long as we possibly can. Try us. It’s a puzzle that only makes sense once all the pieces lock into place. It’s a picture of lifelong friendship, generational rage, and a demand that something better come along — lest we all go down in flames of complicity.

Last Minute Update: T.R.U.E. is releasing new material Friday, June 26. You should definitely go pre-save/get it now!

I hold a strong conviction that one must listen to an album at least four times before making an honest critical evaluation of an album. Every so often an album comes along that grabs you by the throat from the minute you hit play and doesn’t let go until the very end leaving you exhausted, gasping for air and still wanting more.

No Hit Wonders by The Rat Utopia Experiment is exactly that album. Buckle up buttercup, this is going to be a fucker of a ride.

I didn’t even get to a second listen.

But wait a minute – The Rat Utopia Experiment? This has got to be a joke, right? Someone’s pulling a gag? Less than thirty seconds into the first track on the album, “Bleed Me Dry,” and you’ll realize this is no joke – this shit is smoking! You can immediately hear something in Phia’s voice you can’t manufacture — it was one of the first things that made me stop and pay attention. I found myself thinking, holy fuck, how old is this woman? The edges haven’t been worn down; she hasn’t learned what she can’t do yet — so she does it all. The oldest member of this band just turned 21. Collectively, the five of them have been alive about as long as Mick Jagger.

Don’t let that last line fool you, they may be young but they play with a maturity and ferocity well beyond their age. You’d be forgiven if they haven’t made your radar just yet, they’ve mostly stuck to the Pacific Northwest with an occasional jaunt to Boise and Portland. Now let this one sink in — a band that rarely leaves the confines of the Pacific Northwest is sitting at 58,362 monthly Spotify listeners, 26k fans on TikTok and more than 72k followers on Instagram. They’re doing something right.

Formed in Tacoma in 2022, T.R.U.E. — Phia on vocals, Francis on bass, Maddox and Casey on guitars, Evan on drums — describe themselves as a PNW alternative circus act. They’re not wrong. The clown makeup is real, the chaos is real, and the circuit they’ve burned through — Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia — has been building something that the Pacific Northwest has apparently been keeping to itself, but not for very much longer.

Three of the crew, Phia, Evan, and Maddox met during a music summer camp in Tacoma – just normal kids doing normal kid shit. But they decided to form a band. Shifting through a few lineup changes, the core three added Francis on bass and Casey on guitar at the beginning of 2025 and haven’t looked over their shoulder since. And why should they? Nothing but open road ahead.

The band name comes from a real psychological study, the rat utopia experiment, where researchers gave rats everything they needed, removed all struggle, and the rats essentially stopped living. Ceased to thrive. The band named themselves after that study as a deliberate refusal of the premise. Every band member wears uniform clown makeup. The stage chemistry is electric — polished madness.

Here’s what the receipts look like: Sound Off! 2024, the premier 21-and-under showcase in the Pacific Northwest. KISW 99.9 Loud and Local Band of the Week. Airplay on both KEXP and KISW. A Puget Sound commercial. Treefort Fest in Boise. A sold-out night at Neumos — Seattle’s legendary music hall — before most of these kids are old enough to drink in the room they just packed. The résumé doesn’t lie. Neither does the music.

I was a high school sophomore when Bleach first dropped, a friend of mine sent it to my Alaska home on a TDK tape with a note – “Listen to this.” I have visceral memories of the minute or two after I hit play on the tape deck, the thrumming bass line opening “Blew,” the guitar coming in and Kurt starting to sing. Chills still run down my spine thinking of that moment — this is like hearing Bleach for the first time. The same raw energy, anger, and zero fucks about what comes next.

From the moment you hit play on No Hit Wonders, the claws come out and start tightening their grip. You’re only going to get one chance to catch your breath through the blistering eight songs on this album, appropriately at the mid-point, track four, “Interlude for the Angels.” Already showing a sophistication for song placement that takes much more experienced acts years to realize, the breath between the songs can be as important as the songs themselves.

And what songs they are!

The band cites Lamb of God, Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Avenged Sevenfold as just some of their influences. Eddie would be proud to claim “Europa” on nearly any Iron Maiden record, while “Part/Whole” channels Lamb of God heaviness and virtuosity. Now couple this with Phia, the lyrical engine of the band, who cites Nirvana, Bob Dylan, and Elliott Smith among her main influences. Combine those elements and you’ve got crushingly heavy riffs played at breakneck speed while Phia spits some of the most intelligent and confrontational lyrics to come along since John Lydon made it his mission to offend everyone in England.

So you made it this far into the record, track eight is coming along and you finally think you can take a breath. But no — all the way to the very end this album continues to hold, and with “The Rat Who Barked” the nails come out to dig in deeper, making sure you won’t forget this record. In fact, you’ll have the scars to prove it.

True to form, the band has already come out and told everyone to junk this album and wait for the next one, which they’re currently working on. With all due respect to the band, I would suggest you not follow their advice on this one. I got that TDK tape in late 1989. Nevermind didn’t drop until 1991. For just a brief moment in time, Nirvana belonged to a very small few of us — and that felt like something I couldn’t name then and still struggle to now. The world hadn’t found them yet and we were living inside that secret.

Right now, The Rat Utopia Experiment belongs to a very small few. This is your tape. Don’t wait for the world to find them first.

🎧 No Hit Wonders

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Four notes.

Four notes of the new All Them Witches album was all it took to hook me.

Chit chatting with Patrick over the phone, we’re talking about some recent vinyl purchases – him from Time Machine Records in Grants Pass, me from the Vinyl Vault here in Sonora. We both spend way too much on records but after giving up smokes and booze this vice is acceptable.

“And then I picked up this one Hannah recommended – All Them Witches, never heard them but I’m going to give them a listen.” He said.

“Hmm, never heard of them either,” I responded. Any idea what they’re like?

“No – I just don’t want to be that guy,” Patrick says.

“What do you mean?” I inquire, having a sense I already know what he means.

Hannah is significantly younger than the both of us, so she tends to highlight things that might otherwise be off our collective radars. Such an already refined ear is an absolute joy to see in the younger generation.

“That guy who stopped listening to new stuff. I look at my collection and it’s mostly ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s – I don’t want to be that guy,” he says.

“I feel that!” I said.

We disconnect and I slink back into my chair.

I’m not that guy but I don’t want to be that guy either.

I open Apple Music, look up the band – House of Mirrors, just released a week ago. Fuck it, let’s do this.

Four notes and chills run up my spine as the haunting opening riff from “Red Rocking Chair” begins. Charles starts singing and then it hits. Acid Bath, Black Sabbath, Black Angels.

Something primal deep within me stirs and I stand up, launching out of my chair, reach over for the dial and crank it up… oh my… This. Is. Good.

This is what should have been playing when Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were traipsing through a New Orleans cemetery hopped up on psychedelics – that’s where it takes you. But don’t you fucking dare decide to take a nap, we’re just getting started. This is a party pressed onto vinyl and you will be here till we kick you off the porch.

I pop Pat a text – Dude…this is fucking amazing – the first in a rapid-fire stream of consciousness reactions as the album unfolds.

Track three, “Aethernet,” moves us out of the cemetery and along the riverbanks. Muscle shirts, Daisy Dukes, cowboy boots and BBQ. Humid, languid, nasty in all the right ways as folks strip off their clothes and head down to the river for a dip in the water. There’s an unsettled menace in the air like a low-pressure system moving in, a storm nipping at its heels.

The texts continue in a flurry to Patrick, who finally throws up the white flag and tells me it’s in his rotation for tomorrow.

“Tomorrow?! There is no tomorrow,” I respond, no longer in control of my mind or words as I’m transported to wherever these guys want to take me.

Somewhere between track four and track five I pop over to the band’s website and order the vinyl, rush delivery. The party’s moved to no one’s house and it’s a rager as someone lights a bonfire out back and the whiskey is freely flowing.

Around what I tell myself would be the second side (Track six, “Starting Line”), the record’s arc bends back toward Earth and starts to reenter the atmosphere. That raging party has turned into your four best friends on the porch, slightly drunk but hanging on, the moment’s not done. “Starting Line” locks into a riff that pulses and coils like Lennon’s coda on “She’s So Heavy” — except McLeod lets it finish. No rug pull. Just the groove riding all the way home, and somewhere in there Ben McLeod is smiling, hoping you catch it.

By the time “Angel on the Wayside” comes around (Track 8), the party has dwindled to a select few, but damn are they still at it. Dancing, grinding, not as much enthusiasm as earlier but all good things have to come to a close and one by one folks are stumbling to their cars, calling it a night.

“The Welterweight” gets you home but “Saturn Song” tucks you in, gives you a kiss on the forehead as it pulls the covers up under your chin. It’s been one helluva night but now it’s time to shuffle off to dreamland. Tomorrow’s another day, another band, another party.

The best albums take you for a ride. Sometimes the trajectory is a slow on-ramp, merging as the music accelerates till you’re moving full speed down the road. And then there’s House of Mirrors, which goes from 0-whatthefuck without even checking to see if you buckled your seat belt, tossing cigarettes out the window as it cracks a beer.

Ten minutes and a stream of unhinged texts later, a photo lands in my messages. Patrick, needle down, album spinning.

Some records don’t wait for tomorrow.

Heading west toward San Francisco, we’d just come down out of the Sierra Nevada foothills as Highway 108 stretched out in front of us. Still about 100 miles from our destination, California’s vast Central Valley sat between us and the Coast Range.

“So you thinking Portugal?” K asked as the monkeys, absorbed in their own storybook worlds, played in the backseat.

“It’s got to be something similar to where we are now,” I said as I quickly glanced over to her, our concerned eyes locking for a second before mine returned to the road.

This had been an ongoing conversation between the two of us the last few years. Nothing felt safe in our native country and more and more the “cruelty being the point” was living up to its ideals.

Leaving. Leaving everything we loved about this nation, packing it all up and just going somewhere, anywhere else. We were married in one of this nation’s National Parks. My twins spend most of their days on one of the nation’s oldest national forests. To give it all up, to start over…

As I pondered all of this, a song came back to me, a song that seems like it’s always there, just at the edge of a waking dream ready to reassert itself when the moment calls. This stretch of open, golden expanse dominated by oaks always reminded me of the drive out to Jamul and I was back in our San Diego home, to a time before the twins were born.

It’d been a long day. Working all morning on the farm then hurrying home to do some work around the house, exhausted, K and I slipped off to our bedroom to veg out for a while before calling it a night. We were knee deep in the modern western series Longmire, having recently returned from a Wyoming trip and feeling a bit of cowboy nostalgia. K’s head resting on my shoulder, laptop nestled on my legs, we kept each other awake through the episode bone-tired though we were. And then I heard the opening lines of a song as the credits rolled and it stopped me cold — the first time a song had done so in many years.

Exhaustion temporarily hijacked, I immediately took to the internet to figure out what that song was, with its dreamlike sequence opening and the comforting repetition of the main guitar line. The soothing voice that carried a song of sadness like a southern gothic magnolia both blooming and wilting before your eyes.

“The Dark.”

The Bones of JR Jones?

Who are these guys and why had I never heard of them?

When I say these guys, what I mean to say is guy — as in singular. There is an interesting phenomenon in music, call it the punk to folk pipeline. Young kids the world over, eager to play in a band, pick up a guitar and suddenly wake up to the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, or Joy Division. Many stay on this well-worn path but for a select few, the journey leads them down roads they didn’t expect. For Jonathan Linaberry, the JR in The Bones of JR Jones, steeped in the punk aesthetic of the early 2000s, the path diverged when his father gave him a collection of music that harkened back to a different era.

“I grew up listening to punk rock. I fell in love with the blues and folk music when I was 18 or 19 years old after my dad gave me a collection of American roots music, and it totally changed the landscape for me,” Linaberry said in a 2016 interview with Mother Church Pew.

One can claim lineage through one of two ways — earned or given. Most of us know the story of the given: the kid who receives their parents’ name and fortune only to squander it away, no understanding of what it took to get there. Then there is the earned, where the roads less travelled are taken, a light shone on those darker passageways. Linaberry, a classically trained pianist who cut his teeth playing punk rock in bands outside of Syracuse, New York, armed with a collection of Americana music, headed off to New York City and the Pratt Institute to study art and design. Here is where the lightning would strike — in the form of a chance listen in a friend’s dorm room.

“I was in a friend’s dorm, and they were playing a guy named Blind Lemon Jefferson, this old Texas bluesman from the late ‘20s,” Linaberry said in an interview with Salt Lake Magazine.

Raw, ugly, emotive — this recording of the legendary bluesman was more authentic, more punk rock than anything Linaberry had ever heard and it struck something inside him, something deep that would lead him on a path to find the field recordings of Alan Lomax.

In 1933, Alan Lomax set out across the American South and Midwest alongside his father John, determined to document and preserve the traditional and folk music of the region before it disappeared entirely. Working with a portable recording machine, Lomax captured anyone willing to sit for him — one Saturday recording Jimmie Rodgers, the following Sunday the Carter Family. The resulting archive, now housed in the Library of Congress, includes some of the earliest recordings of Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie. The Lomax recordings are both invaluable and complicated — questions of consent, compensation and a white Northern academic extracting cultural material from poor Black and rural communities without meaningful reciprocity have followed his legacy ever since. But what they preserved changed Linaberry permanently.

At first blush, punk to Americana seems counterintuitive. Blow the dust off and it becomes immediately obvious — the connective tissue is authenticity. The bootleggers running ‘shine through Appalachian hollers and the punk kid playing basement shows are animated by the same spirit — raw, unmediated, outside the sanctioned channels of polite society. It’s both lived experience and aesthetic that shows itself in the lyrics of the music. That thread runs from “Which Side Are You On” echoing from the hills to Dylan’s protest folk and John Prine to the Dead Kennedys’ “Police Truck” without ever losing the plot.

Whether it’s instinct or training doesn’t really matter. Not content to solely abide the folk or punk traditions, Linaberry adds a dash of Faulkner’s Southern Gothic weight both lyrically and musically — the beauty and rot sitting side by side, the past refusing to stay buried. Put all of that into a band and you have the world Jonathan Linaberry is working in.

But it wasn’t right away. The love of American roots music came to him in his late teens and early twenties. Linaberry would need to go on, start building a life — bartending, teaching preschool, playing in an acoustic group called Feverfew. Taking a page from his punk background, absorbing the music fully, coupled with hard-earned experience, before being ready to put his own touch on it. He released his first EP in 2012 with The Wildness, his first full length, Dark Was the Yearling, in 2014. Twelve years of walking the walk before The Bones of JR Jones was fully ready to make its entrance on the world’s stage.

How you hear Linaberry has everything to do with how you’ve experienced him. His live performances and what’s captured on his studio albums are, at times, two completely different animals. Linaberry himself has acknowledged the gap — the atmosphere created in the studio just isn’t there at a solo performance level, which is to be expected. Lower the tone arm on side one of Dark Was the Yearling and “Dreams to Tell” fills the speakers, the staccato of the guitar setting the mood while Linaberry’s voice stands in for a harmonica on the song’s opening wails. Contrast this to his live performance of the same song — just the man on stage with only his banjo, the tempo brought significantly down. What shows up as a Saturday night rocker on the album is turned into a Sunday morning hymnal when performed for an audience.

As the album unfolds across 41 minutes and 12 tracks, all of America’s musical ghosts are on display holding space for their newest acolyte — the chain-gang hum that opens “Ticket Home,” the Doc Watson-like guitar picking on “Hearts Racing,” the echo of every Delta Blues singer long forgotten on “Fury of the Light.” The casual listener will find something deeply comforting and familiar within the album while the more serious listener will find themselves compelled to take a journey — a journey that is the songbook of this nation so many of us call home.

And then there is “The Dark,” the song that forever set me in Linaberry’s orbit like a moon to the Earth. I’ve always preferred my music on vinyl — “The Dark” breathes life into side two of the record. The opening sequence transports you through a haze of humidity and clouds to a land of Linaberry’s making. “All our sweetest sins, carry them to our end.” And you’re there, walking among the dilapidated house watching a family keep its secrets inside like a narrator in a Faulkner novel, taking notes to carry back to the world. The music soothing, the lyrics unsettling, the image painted something all of us carry — lived or inherited.

Somewhere between the Delta and doling out juice boxes, K and I return to the expat conversation.

“Only American hubris would call it expat-ing and not immigrating,” I say, the disgust just on the edge of my words.

K snickers at the observation before responding.

“I don’t know, I don’t want to give up just yet and I also don’t want to wait until it’s too late,” she says, her eyes turned toward the landscape outside the window. “This is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been in and I really don’t want to give up on it.”

“Me either,” I say, realizing my fears are the same as hers — not wanting to leave too late but not yet willing to give up. “I just wish there was some sort of a speck out there right now that felt like hope.”

The speck is already there. It’s been playing on my turntable for years.

Tilting the rearview mirror to better see the monkeys, I stare for just a minute at those two little miracles sitting in the back seat. I bring my gaze back up to the road, K is still looking out the window. I take her hand, bring it to my lips and gently kiss it as I’ve done so many times before.

“It’s not time yet, my love,” I say to her. “And what we’re building will give us some leeway should it come to that. All of this, everything before us, it’s worth fighting for — and you and me and those two munchkins in the back, we’re fighters.”

“I know,” she whispers as she squeezes my hand, gently releasing pressure but not my hand.

Do you know what chill hours are? They’re the amount of time a fruit tree needs to stay in a state of dormancy, somewhere between 32 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit to produce fruit. Honeycrisp apples need about 1200 or so, Bing cherries want in the neighborhood of 800 and the delicate Blenheim apricot gets by with about 400. The tree of rock and roll apparently needed 20 years but it’s finally starting to wake up.

Maybe we needed 2016 and a real-life monster manifesting in the form of a reality television star turned president with an administration whose corruption made Nixon’s look like saints. Maybe we needed the ennui and passivity of a Biden administration and their lackadaisical, milquetoast passivity that did nothing to ensure protections into the future enabling the orange monster to come screaming back in 2024. Paw-paw shuffling toward the Oval Office when he should have been shuffling toward the porch and his rocking chair. Maybe that mix of servility and malice was exactly the fertilizer the tree of rock needed to start rooting again.

I’d like to introduce you to Dexter and the Moonrocks. While some acts were busy manufacturing their moment — fake accounts, algorithmic manipulation, thousands of phantom fans conjured from a marketing firm’s server farm — four guys from Throckmorton, Texas were playing to a bartender who asked them to keep it down.

They coined the term western space grunge– while their music is serious, irreverence is a streak that runs a mile wide down these boys’ back. Sad cowboy music is another way they’ve described what they make but they’ve been quick to ensure all of us understand what they mean. On the band’s official TikTok, drummer, Ryan Fox explained:

“We don’t mean six-hundred-dollar pairs of boots and songs about tractors and patriotism. We mean ‘The government does not care about me. I am an abused member of the workforce, and my body is broken even though I’m twenty-three.’ Please stop confusing the two.”

If you’d never heard of Throckmorton, Texas don’t worry no one in the blessed world minus the 730 souls who call it home have. For the four guys making up this nonsensical sounding band – we’ll get back to that – their closest paying gig was 71 miles to the north in Abilene which unless you’re from Texas you’ve probably never heard of either!

“There’s one traffic light in town, and it’s just a blinking red light,” Tuffs said of his hometown of about 730 residents in an interview with Texas Monthly. “There’s no grocery store. You have to drive thirty miles to go grocery shopping... Your neighbors probably have pigs. It sounds like I’m talking bad about it, but somehow, I like it.”

Before there was a band there were four young men doing what young men in small town Texas do — making a living with their hands and their backs. James Tuffs was a fry cook. Ryan Anderson was working oil fields. Ty Anderson was decorating concrete surfaces. Ryan Fox was coaching kids baseball. Between the four of them they covered most of the ways a man can wear himself out in rural west Texas before thirty. These are not men who grew up being told they were special. They grew up being told to show up and do the work.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what they did.

The more you peel back the layers of this band the stranger, or depending on your view, glorious it gets. These young men were just busy scratching out a life in a small Texas town whose biggest claim to fame was being one of many waypoints on the Great Western Trail cattle drives.

Following high school, Tuffs entered Cisco College seeking a degree in kinesiology – the study of human movement – all while working in a restaurant kitchen. Music was Tuffs’ thing – he begged his buddy Ryan Anderson, a childhood friend, to teach him guitar which he eventually did. Tuffs was penning lyrics on the regular and found himself one evening sharing a few originals with his parents. Duly impressed, Tuffs parents entered their son into a songwriting contest (without his knowledge) and while he didn’t win, he came damn close, making it to the finals.

“After I made the finals,” Tuffs said, “this dude walked up to me, and he was like, ‘Yo, man, I’m trying to start a record label. I really think that one day you could work in music.’ And I was super stoked. I think I was nineteen at the time, and I just called Ryan, and I was like, ‘Yo, dude, drop out of college. We’re starting a band.’ And he literally dropped out of college. We literally started a band.”

So now a fry cook, an oil field operator, a concrete surface decorator and a kid’s baseball coach were in a band. They just needed a name.

Tuffs has mentioned hearing Death Cab for Cutie on his parents stereo while growing up and here’s one of those cosmic jokes come to life. When Death Cab for Cutie lead singer, Ben Gibbard was asked by Time Out Chicago how they came up with the name, he responded

“The name was never supposed to be something that someone was going to reference 15 years on. So yeah, I would absolutely go back and give it a more obvious name.”

Cut to Tuffs being asked a similar question – their name came about simply because James Tuffs thought Dexter and the Moonrocks sounded cooler than James and the Moonrocks. There wasn’t much thought put in. It was about that quick. They’ve joked that Dexter is someone they kidnapped years ago and keep in the basement stealing his musical superpowers, surviving on a diet of cat treats and yogurt.

Whether Tuffs knew that story about Death Cab and their name or was just walking down a well-trodden path, we may never know. History rhymes, history repeats and the universe gleefully laughs.

And now these kids are selling out shows in Los Angeles. But they did it the old-fashioned way, they earned it touring across the country, building a fan base who adores them.

Three shows in 2021, 18 shows in 2022, 53 shows in 2023. 62 shows in 2024. 50 shows in 2025 and still going.

They toured with Mitchell Ferguson, Red Leather, Cigarettes at Sunset and kept building their network, kept grinding, kept honing their craft ‘till 2025 when they played the Vans Warped Tour in Long Beach.

Night after night they just put their head down and played – any market, any town regardless of cantankerous bartenders or being in someone’s basement. That’s not a band gaming an algorithm, that’s a band logging miles - 73,381 to be exact. More than 70,000 miles of blood, sweat and tears – I can only hope with each mile another entry is made in the bands songbook, oh the stories it will tell.

As Ty Anderson, the rig worker, has said - beats the hell outta a pulling unit.

In Dexter and the Moonrocks you can hear the influences of the past. You hear arrangements a ’la the Kings of Leon, of the trademark storytelling musings of the Turnpike Troubadours, the infusion of grunge and indie courtesy of Nirvana and Death Cab for Cutie. The cynic might choose to see derivative, the romantic optimist, of which I count myself instead sees DNA. The thoughtful sees it for what it is – another scion harvested from the tree of Rock and Roll and grafted on to the current era.

“We realized that oil workers like to listen to Alice in Chains, and the goth kids like Tyler Childers so why couldn’t we do both? And so we did, and it worked so well,” Tuffs has said.

Take the song “Ritalin”: “I’m not myself without my medicine/I took some Ritalin, wasn’t a little bit.”

Of course a kid from nowhere Texas in 2026 would write an ode to one of this generation’s most over prescribed pills. James Tuffs - 26, Ryan Anderson - 26, Ryan Fox - 24 — solidly Gen Z, grew up as the most medicated cohort in history — many of them were put on stimulants as kids, some diagnosed, some not. It’s normalized in a way that would have been unthinkable in the 80s when “Ritalin” was considered controversial and slightly sinister. Ritalin is to today’s younger generation with its nod to losing oneself via ADHD medication what Nirvana’s “Dumb”, with its talk of opiate-induced haze, physical sluggishness and detached euphoria as wink and a nod to heroin was to the kids of the 90s. Young adults have long channeled their generational trauma through guitars, Dexter is just writing the current soundtrack.

And here’s the rub – they don’t even have a full-length album out yet, nor are there any stated plans. The best fans of the band are going to get is the occasional single drop – “12 Steps” is slated for May 27 -- and the continued string of EPs – clearly these boys are not following a playbook. Or maybe they are, a playbook written on a dusty cattle trail by a 23-year-old whose body is already broken from a life baked in the west Texas sun and the type of labor that puts calluses on your hands, labor that leaves marks that doesn’t wash off.

In horticulture there’s a lot of truths, rules that will burn you if you try to break them one such truth, a truth these four men from Throckmorton, Texas have woven into the fabric of their being - you can’t fake the cold, you can’t fake the hard times. The tree either goes through winter or it doesn’t bear fruit.

Dexter and the Moonrocks’ 2025 Tour Set List on Apple Music