Hi and welcome to another edition of the Sorry State Records weekly newsletter! The holiday shopping season started in full force this week, so we’ve been busy as hell around here. We’re trying to keep the store as stocked as we can (the supply chain issues we’ve all been reading about make that a challenge, but we’ve had a run of scoring some very cool used collections) while the website continues to be as busy as ever. I was looking ahead at what’s on the way for December and it looks to be another gnarly month with plenty of new releases we’re excited about. So read on to see what’s been moving us, and hopefully you’ll find something that does the same for you.

Urin: Afekt 7” (Iron Lung Records) One night a few weeks ago, I was making dinner and had Life During Wartime playing in the background, as I often do. Life During Wartime introduces me to cool stuff I didn’t know about all the time, but I can’t remember another occasion when a track was so good I had to stop what I was doing and consult the show notes to figure out who the band was. Turns out it was a track from this latest EP from Germany’s Urin. We really liked Urin’s first EP here at Sorry State (it was Record of the Week back in August 2019) and we were lucky enough to see them live on their last jaunt to the US, but none of that prepared me for Afekt’s ferocity. The sound is dense, knotty, and noisy punk that sounds like a piece of dying industrial equipment having a panic attack. While it exists in the same universe as the Kyushu-style noise punk we all know and love (Confuse, Swankys, Gai, etc.), it’s also different. The rhythms are knottier and the riffs (well, what you can make out of them), are more complex. While a lot of bands of this ilk are solely about the noise, there is ripping hardcore lurking at the core of Afekt. The noisy parts dominate, though, not just providing texture, but annihilating the more conventional punk sounds. It’s chaotic in an over the top way, but there’s still an electric sense of energy to the recording. (It doesn’t hurt that Urin recorded at Bogota’s Casa Rat Trap and mastered these tracks at Tokyo’s Noise Room, two establishments that know how to make a killer-sounding punk record.) Afekt is so abrasive that it’s likely to scare off all but the most hardcore, but those of us who treasure our D-Clone, Confuse, and Horrendous 3D records will have no problem finding space in our listening diets for this.

When Quarantine shipped us our copies of their LP, their bass player Jeff (@my_fetalbrain on Instagram) included a bunch of his artwork in the box. One piece was his interpretation of an old R Crumb drawing, and when we saw it we knew we had to use it for some merch. I’m sure we’ll do some t-shirts down the line, but in the meantime we printed up a bunch of these stickers, which we’ll be throwing in free with orders for the next several weeks until they run out.

Scalple and Scarecrow are doing a short northeast tour over the New Year holiday! Check out the sick flyer courtesy of the incomparable Keith Caves. If we’re coming near you, mark your calendars.

Usman pairs up another couple of noisy Japanese crushers for this week’s edition of Hardcore Knockouts. This was a tough one. Gasmask is pretty obscure, so I’m surprised they did as well as they did, but LSD is untouchable in my book.

Cast your vote in the next edition of Hardcore Knockouts on our Instagram stories next Tuesday!

My pick from Sorry State’s Discogs listings this week is the Decolonization EP from New York’s Kaleidoscope. Like everyone else with taste, we’ve been bumping the new Tower 7 album pretty much constantly around Sorry State. It’ll be next week at least before we get in copies (and we’re not getting as many as we would have liked), but in the meantime we have this little gem if any of you are going back to complete your D4MT Labs collection.

Remember, you can always combine your order from Sorry State’s Discogs site with your order from our webstore and save on shipping!

DECEMBER 4
TETANUS IN CHARLOTTE

DECEMBER 6
TORSO IN OAKLAND

DECEMBER 13
MUTANT STRAIN IN CHARLOTTE

DECEMBER 27
SCALPLE & SCARECROW IN CARRBORRO

DECEMBER 2-6
TORSO TOUR ON THE WEST COAST

1. Poison Idea: The Beast Goes East 12” (TKO)
2. Scalple: Skillful Butchers 12” (Sorry State)
3. The Chisel: Enough Said 7” (Wardance)
4. Dorothy: I Confess b/w Softness 7” (Sealed)
5. Vatican Commandos: Hit Squad for God 7” (Radiation Reissues)
6. Yleiset Syyt: Umpikujamekanismi 7” (Open Up and Bleed Recordings)
7. Quarantine: Agony 12” (Damage United)
8. Unidad Ideológical: S/T 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus)
9. Vatican Commandos: Just a Frisbee 7” (Radiation Reissues)
10. Nightfeeder: S/T 7” (Black Water)

Here are our top sellers of the past 30 days here at Sorry State. The people have spoken and you love punk! Us too. Maybe we should hang out or something?

Click here to see what the SSR Crew is into this week!

As Usman mentioned in his staff pick, we just got in two new releases on Hoehnie Records: reissues of two great and obscure Finnish hardcore compilations: Lasta and Hyvinkaa.

Denver’s Convulse Records continues documenting that city’s fertile hardcore scene with three new releases. My favorite of the bunch is this demo from Destiny Bond, but Cyst and Devoured by Rats are no slouches either. Besides those Denver cassettes, Convulse also has a full-length record from Romania’s Cold Brats.

We just got in Revelation Records’ new release from Orange County, California’s DARE. We have two different color vinyl versions, so grab those while you can!

Audacious Madness specializes in crust, and they keep that pattern going with this new split 12” from Moscow’s Fatum and Ontario’s Decade.

Inu Wan Wan is a new label focusing on interesting new Japanese music, and we have their first release in stock now: a new album from Japanese goth / post-punk band Gotou.

I’m a huge Naked Raygun fan, so I was stoked to bring in copies of their latest full-length record (and first in a very long time), Over the Overlords. I’m sure I’ll write about this for the newsletter soon, but this is a Naked Raygun record, and like all Raygun records, it has tracks. Check out “Living in the Good Times” for proof this band can still write a belter.

Chaotic Uprising Records brings us two tapes from Antisocial Action, a very gnarly and blown-out noise punk band. These tapes will test your capacity for aural punishment!

We just got in a new promo tape from a new band from New Jersey called Shock Tactics. Featuring members of heaps of other bands, Shock Tactics play an oi!-tinged hardcore style akin to 86 Mentality and Violent Reaction.

We also have a new tape from Brute Spring, a rad no wave / industrial / experimental project out of Buffalo, New York.