Garage Punk Record Labels: The Imprints That Kept the Scene Alive

Garage punk never had a major label behind it, and it never needed one. It survived on a dozen or so small operations run by people who were fans first and businessmen a distant second. The bands made the noise. The labels decided which noise got pressed, sleeved and sent out where other people could hear it.

This is not a ranking. A label that reissues forgotten 1966 singles and a label that signs a Memphis band nobody has heard of are doing different jobs, so we have grouped them by what they do. For each one: what they put out, why it mattered, and where to start when we are sure of the record. Where we could not confirm a founding year or a city, we left it out rather than guess.

If you are new to the genre itself, read what garage punk is first and come back.

The reissuers: labels that dug up the 1960s

Crypt

Tim Warren’s Crypt is the label that drew the map. The Back from the Grave compilations, which started in 1983, collected teenage garage singles that had sold a few hundred copies in their own town and then vanished. Warren’s rules were strict and his liner notes were opinionated to the point of comedy: no folk-rock, no psychedelic noodling, no ballads. Just the meanest, most primitive stuff he could find.

That purism was the point. It taught a generation what the sound was before anyone had a name for it. Crypt later ran the Teenage Shutdown series too, and did something reissue labels rarely manage: it signed new bands that deserved the company, among them the Gories, the Devil Dogs and the Oblivians.

Start with Back from the Grave Vol. 1. Then play the Oblivians’ Popular Favorites and hear how little thirty years changed.

Bomp! and Voxx

Greg Shaw ran Who Put the Bomp as a fanzine before Bomp! became a label in Los Angeles in the 1970s. His Pebbles series, which began at the end of that decade, did for 60s garage what Nuggets had started, only rougher and more obscure. Voxx was the Bomp! imprint that leaned into the 80s garage revival. Shaw died in 2004. Without him, a lot of the people who started the labels further down this page would never have heard the records that made them want to.

Norton

Billy Miller and Miriam Linna started Norton in New York in 1986, after years of writing Kicks magazine together. Linna had drummed in the earliest Cramps line-up, which tells you something about the taste. Norton’s specialty was the wild men history had shelved: Hasil Adkins, Andre Williams, Link Wray, plus a long run of rockabilly and R&B obscurities.

Hurricane Sandy flooded their Brooklyn warehouse in 2012 and destroyed a large part of the stock. Miller died in 2016. Norton is less a garage punk label than a garage punk sensibility applied to everything that came before it. Start with Hasil Adkins’ Out to Hunch, and if one man with a drum kit under his feet does not make sense to you, nothing else on Norton will.

The new-band labels: where the 90s and 2000s happened

Estrus

Dave Crider ran Estrus out of Bellingham, Washington, and played in the Mono Men while he did it. The label was the Pacific Northwest’s answer to Crypt: louder, more surf-damaged, and dressed in sleeves by Art Chantry that made every release look like a lost drive-in poster. Estrus also threw the Garage Shock festivals in Bellingham, which pulled the scene into one town for a weekend.

Start with Man or Astro-man?’s Is It… Man or Astro-man? It is surf, not garage punk in the strict sense, and that is exactly why it shows how wide the Estrus net was.

In the Red

Larry Hardy founded In the Red in Los Angeles in 1991, and it has the best batting average of any label here. The Dirtbombs’ Ultraglide in Black, the Reigning Sound’s Time Bomb High School, the Ty Segall Band’s Slaughterhouse, the Oblivians’ reunion record Desperation — that is a short list, not a highlights reel.

Hardy’s taste runs to records that are blown out but still built on real songs. Start with Jay Reatard’s Blood Visions (2006). Fifteen tracks, barely half an hour, no wasted second.

Goner

Goner is a Memphis record shop and label run by Eric Friedl of the Oblivians and Zac Ives. It also puts on Gonerfest every year, which has become the closest thing this music has to a family reunion. The label’s ear runs to the scuzzy end of the spectrum. Start with Ty Segall’s Melted (2010), the record where he stopped sounding like a promising kid and started sounding like himself.

Dirtnap

Dirtnap leans toward the poppier, faster side: punk with hooks, often more Buzzcocks than Sonics. Its claim to permanence is the Exploding Hearts’ Guitar Romantic (2003), one of the best debut albums of its decade by anyone. Dirtnap also released the Marked Men, who deserve more ears than they got. Start with Guitar Romantic. Everyone does, and everyone is right.

Get Hip and Dionysus

Two long-running labels that did the unglamorous work. Get Hip comes out of Pittsburgh and is run by Gregg Kostelich of the Cynics, who have been playing 60s-style garage since the mid-80s. It mixes new bands with reissues and has also worked as a distributor, which kept a lot of small-label records moving. Dionysus, run by Lee Joseph in the Los Angeles area, has done the same kind of patient work with garage, surf and psych for decades. Neither label is famous. Both are the reason other labels’ records reached your town.

The weird ones

Sympathy for the Record Industry

Long Gone John ran Sympathy out of Long Beach, California, from the late 1980s, and its catalogue runs into the hundreds with almost no visible plan. Garage punk, noise, lo-fi, art releases, coloured vinyl, odd formats. Some of it is essential and some of it is unlistenable, which is the honest price of a label with no filter but one man’s curiosity.

The essential part includes the first three White Stripes albums: The White Stripes, De Stijl and White Blood Cells. Start with De Stijl. It is the one where Jack White’s Detroit blues obsession and Meg White’s drumming lock together.

Slovenly

Slovenly’s habit is looking past the American scene. Its roster has drawn heavily on bands from Europe, Latin America and further out, at a time when most US garage labels mostly signed their friends. We are not going to recommend one starting record from a catalogue that broad. Browse the label’s own listings and pick a country you have never heard garage punk from.

Total Punk

Rich Evans’ Total Punk, out of Orlando, Florida, is mostly a singles label, and the singles come in a house design you learn to recognise from across a record shop. Short, cheap, fast, no deluxe editions. It is the 7-inch economy that built the 90s scene, still running. There is no single starting point because the label is built to be sampled: pick up any three and you will know whether it is for you.

What the list leaves out

Plenty. Rip Off, Rob’s House, Hate, Bachelor and a stack of European labels all deserve their own paragraphs, and we will get to them once we can stand behind every fact. For the bands themselves, go to our guide to the best garage punk bands. For how the whole thing grew from 60s singles into a 90s underground, read the history of garage punk. And for fanzines, archives and other places to dig, our resources page is the next stop.