Post-punk art-punk eggpunk something something. There is one common word in all those style names, I guess. And while all of those words hold some meaning, let’s just get to the point: Uranium Club play verbose, angular rock that grabs your attention and keeps it. It’s 2024. Now that you’ve got the recommendation, click a link and decide for yourself.

I’ll admit it took me a few listens for Grumpster’s third LP to hit the way Fever Dream got me two years ago. But once it clicked for me, it’s clearly the same band as they transition to a slightly rougher sound that maintains that same underlying melodic pop base. This time you’ll get notes of grunge and even hardcore but those labels don’t really tell the story. The most applicable label is simply that it’s East Bay punk with some serious pop sensibility bubbling under the surface.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for the way that Chris Mason makes rough melodies shine. New band Faulty Cognitions has this same vocal feature, but with a college rock thing going on. You get verbose, meaningful lyrics that still manage real emotion. There’s a sense of longing, but more cathartic than anxious.

Vial teased their new record with a run of singles -- which is the norm these days, I guess. But in this case, snippets really do help to shape the full record. The band is sort of all over the place, ranging from serious to sad to silly, on burnout, but with a unified framework of accessible, empowering indie-punk. It’s catchy and fun, but it manages to balance that with an impossible to describe authenticity.

Protopunk is one of those words you see thrown around with new bands but the label never really fits. Maybe it’s a simple matter of time or technology, but some things can’t be recreated. Yet, life is full of surprises. Sleeveens remind me of the early days of protopunk. It’s raw and primal and the energy transcends through the recording. But they aren’t just covering “Search and Destroy” here. They’re telling their own stories about growing up, struggle, and finding their own.