Loads of cool punk albums have come out recently and I know we don’t do too much punk rock stuff on Sick Chirpse but I really wanted to share so here we go. I might do one of these every month or something. I’m not even sure if all these albums have been officially released yet but they’re all sick so you should check them out when they come out or just search around the internet for them, they probably aren’t that hard to find:

I wasn’t really that excited about this album because two of their members had left, it had been fvcking ages since they released anything and the new song they posted didn’t really sound that great. Well, how wrong could I have been? Despite losing their vocalist – which was pretty much was distinguished them from other bands – and the main source of their backing vocals, they’ve found two guys who sound exactly like them and have managed to continue seamlessly with their anthemic, glossy, breakneck pop punk. After a couple of listens I would argue that this is better than their previous full length. Obviously it isn’t as good as the EP though. Only thing slightly disappointing is the name, what are they like 10 years old or something?

BALANCE AND COMPOSURE – SEPARATION

There’s a lot of hype around Balance and Composure and has been for a while but I had never really checked them out before. What a sucker, I definitely should have. Apparently this album is meant to be a 90’s grunge revival and is heavily influenced by Nirvana, Neutral Milk Hotel and Sunny Day Real Estate and one of my friends even said it sounded like ‘the first time he listened to Nirvana.’ I thought that was a pretty dumb comment as who honestly remembers the first time they heard Nirvana – they’re everywhere. Anyway, I didn’t really notice any of those influences except for the obvious dynamic changes and feedback sounds but any band who knows anything would include them anyway. I felt more like it sounded like Modern Life Is War playing pop punk with the atmospherics of latter day Brand New thrown in. A lot of build up and slow powerful beatdowns. The drums sound great too.