What Is Garage Punk?

Garage punk is rock ‘n’ roll played too fast, too loud and slightly wrong, by people who would rather sound like themselves than sound correct. Two guitars, a bass, drums, and a singer who is shouting more than singing. Fuzz on everything. Songs that stop at two minutes because everything worth saying has been said.

It sits between two things. The 1960s garage bands supply the tunes, the cheap organ and the sneer — thousands of teenagers who made one single after watching the Rolling Stones on television and mostly never made a second. Punk supplies the speed and the refusal to apologise. Garage punk is what a band sounds like when it loves both and declines to choose, and it has been a living tradition ever since punk existed rather than a revival of one.

The attitude is the part that stays fixed while the decades move. Amateurism as a position, not an excuse. Nobody in this music is trying to play better than the song needs, and a group that has been together six months is considered no less legitimate than one that has been together twenty years. If you want the boundary drawn more finely, we took a whole piece to argue about where garage punk ends and garage rock begins.

The rough recording is a decision

People arriving from cleaner music hear the fidelity first and read it as a limitation. Mostly it is a choice, and often the most deliberate one on the record. Distortion collapses the distance between a good player and a bad one, which is useful when the point is the song rather than the performance. It also puts the voice in the same room as the drums instead of floating it on top of them, so the whole thing arrives as one noise coming at you rather than four separate tracks arranged politely.

Bands in this world do clean up sometimes, and our honest opinion is that it usually costs them the thing that made them worth hearing in the first place. There is a version of nearly every great garage punk record that is better played, better recorded and much less good.

Sixty years on one shelf

Everything above is a description, and you can find versions of it anywhere. Here is the part we can actually show you. Our archive reconstructs sixteen underground radio shows that went out between 2005 and 2019. Their hosts did not coordinate, did not share a playlist and in most cases never spoke to each other. Between them they put 7,663 tracks on air by 5,016 different artists.

Ranked by how many separate shows played an artist at least once — we count shows rather than plays, because plays only tell you what one host was obsessed with that year, while agreement between strangers tells you where the genre is:

Now read the decades off it. Bo Diddley and Little Richard were making records in the 1950s, before the word garage meant anything but a place to keep a car. The Sonics were in Tacoma in the mid-1960s, the Kinks in London, the 13th Floor Elevators in Texas. The Ramones formed in New York in the 1970s, the Damned in England, the Saints in Australia, the Real Kids in Boston. Miracle Workers belong to the 1980s revival, a scene whose whole project was going back for the 1960s records on purpose.

And the heaviest rotation in the archive is none of that. Liquids and Neo Neos top the play count at 26 each, both current, both recorded in a way that would have sounded broken in 1966.

That range is the definition. A list that runs from a 1950s R&B single to a lo-fi record from last year, drawn in nearly the same place by sixteen people who never compared notes, says more than any sentence about raw energy and three chords. Treat it as evidence rather than a verdict, though. Sixteen shows are not the world: they lean English-language, they lean towards the scenes their hosts lived in, the sample stops in 2019, and several other shows in the archive have playlists we could not parse at all, so their taste is missing from every number here.

Where to start

Five records, in the order we would hand them to somebody who had heard none of this. These are our opinions, not the archive’s.

The Sonics, “Psycho.” Tacoma, mid-1960s, and still the meanest-sounding thing on the list. Gerry Roslie does not sing so much as shout at the room until the tape gives up. Most 1960s garage sounds well-mannered next to it. If this does nothing for you, the genre probably will not either, and that is worth finding out in two and a half minutes rather than two years.

Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley.” Six shows played him and the reason is structural: half of what came after is built on his rhythm. Put this next to anything from the 2010s in the archive and the family resemblance is embarrassing.

13th Floor Elevators, “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” The point where garage stops being a party and starts being unwell. Roky Erickson’s voice, an electric jug, and no interest whatsoever in whether you are following.

Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop.” The most widely shared record in the archive. It got there by being a 1960s pop single stripped of everything that slowed it down, which is also a fair description of what this genre keeps trying to do.

The Cramps, “Human Fly.” Proof that looking backwards is not the same as archaeology. They took the 1950s records seriously as horror rather than as nostalgia, and the six shows that played them were not playing them as a joke.

After that, the 1970s row of the table is the fastest way forward: the Damned’s “New Rose,” the Saints’ “(I’m) Stranded,” the Real Kids’ “All Kindsa Girls.” Three countries, one idea.

Then go and read what a real show played on a real night. We are not affiliated with the people who made these programmes; the archive is rebuilt from Internet Archive captures. Start with how the network came together and fell apart, then pick a playlist: It’s Trash!, MRR Radio or The Mal Thursday Show. And if you make this stuff now, send it to us — plenty of what those hosts played hardest was made by people nobody had heard of at the time.