Hello and welcome to another edition of the Sorry State Records weekly newsletter! This week we pushed our newsletter schedule up by a day, so I’m typing this on Wednesday evening. Tomorrow morning I’m flying to LA for the Lie Detector fest. Public Acid is playing, so Jeff and the crew will be out there too, and I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of bands that I’ve either not seen before or not seen enough. I’m hyped for Electric Chair, Bloodstains, Tortür, Blazing Eye, and Deseos Primitivos, but it doesn’t look like there’s a clunker on the bill. I took the plunge and got a rental car, so I’ll be cruising around to record stores and vegan food spots while I’m in town, too. If anyone has a line on any must-see attractions, let me know! And of course if you’ll be at the gigs, say hi! For those of you who aren’t going, there are plenty of killer records in this week to console yourselves with, so keep reading for the lowdown on all that.

Nightfeeder: S/T 7" (Black Water Records) We loved Nightfeeder’s first cassette here at Sorry State, so we were eager to hear this vinyl debut on Black Water Records, which offers re-recorded versions of two tracks from the cassette alongside two new ones. The comparisons I threw out for Nightfeeder’s cassette were Judgement and Criminal Trap-era Anti-Cimex, and those both still feel spot-on, though the two new tracks lean a little more toward Judgement’s grandiosity. I love the way “1491” comes to a full stop before building to its epic guitar lead, and the rocked-out main riff to “Havin a Hard Time” could have been penned by Zigyaku himself. “Rotten,” though it also appeared on the tape, is a great closer, alternating between blistering early Cimex-style rippage and catchy metallic riffing. Avoiding the self-consciously raw sound favored by a lot of current bands, I’m glad to hear Nightfeeder put their skill and power in the foreground, since the fuller production works great with their anthemic, fist-pumping sound. Too many bands with a sound that was too slick and too metallic made a lot of us sick of this style in the 2000s, but Nightfeeder gets everything right on these four tracks.

We get messages on our Instagram page all the time about hardcore knockouts saying “this is too hard!” When this week’s Hardcore Knockouts popped up on my screen, I had the same reaction. How does one choose between the Stalin and the Comes? I voted for the Comes, but fuck… that was a tough one.

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 this CD box set of Datapanik In the Year Zero by Pere Ubu. Datapanik was originally a 12” EP released in 1978 that compiled tracks from Pere Ubu’s great but hard to find early singles. This box set expands that to include nearly everything Pere Ubu recorded between 1975 and 1982. I’ve only spent time with the early Ubu singles and the first two albums, but I’m hoping to tread further into their discography at some point. If you’re looking to do that as well, this cheap used box set is a great opportunity.

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

DECEMBER 13
MUTANT STRAIN IN CHARLOTTE

DECEMBER 27
SCALPLE AND SCARECROW IN CHAPEL HILL

DECEMBER 27 - JANUARY 1
SCALPLE AND SCARECROW TOUR

JANUARY 29
LASSO IN SAO PAULO

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. Yleiset Syyt: Umpikujamekanismi 7” (Open Up and Bleed)
6. Vatican Commandos: Hit Squad for God 7” (Radiation Reissues)
7. Nightfeeder: S/T 7” (Black Water)
8. Lebenden Toten: Near Dark 12” (Black Water)
9. Various: Bloodstains Across Orange County Vol 1 cassette (n/a)
10. Various: Bloodstains Across Orange County Vol 2 cassette (n/a)

Here’s our list of the top sellers at Sorry State over the past 30 days. Those of you who missed out on the Sorry State exclusive pressing of The Beast Goes East will be pleased to hear that we have a shipment of the regular black vinyl version arriving on Friday, so watch the webstore for that!

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

We are super excited the Pyhäkoulu reissue on Svart Records is finally in stock! This is some great, underrated Finnish hardcore and Svart has done their usual bang-up job on the reissue, including great sound and a thick booklet full of archival material. We have a stack of them, but they’re already moving quickly!

We just got in the new Vivisected Numbskulls 7” on Chaotic Uprisings! We loved the Numbskulls’ two cassettes, but these five tracks still exceeded our high expectations.

This week Merge Records announced a new album from indie rock mainstays Superchunk, and they’ve made an exclusive edition on “watermelon” colored vinyl that is only available from North Carolina record stores (you can’t even buy it from Merge’s webstore). Sorry State is a North Carolina record store, so we have a preorder going for the record right now! Besides the special vinyl color, the NC edition also includes an exclusive print from NC art / punk legend Ron Liberti.

It seems like nary a week goes by without a new release on Feel It Records, and this week we have the second album from Chicago’s Man-Eaters! This time around, they’ve amped up the rock and roll elements in their sound while retaining the punk attitude. We even have a few copies on limited yellow/pink vinyl!

We got a shipment from Prank Records with some copies of the Crow: Last Chaos reissue (you may remember there was a huge run on these back when they were first released), a fresh repress of Totlitär’s classic Sin Egen Motståndare LP on fresh vinyl colors, and a reissue of Grimple’s Up Your Ass album.

New York’s Burning Paradise label has a new release from Factory City Children, a solo project from Mateo of Warthog. I think I read that this will be a 7” on Toxic State, but you can grab this version right now! We also restocked the Salvaje Punk cassette in case you missed that when it came out earlier this year.

Japanese reissue label Bitter Lake Recordings has a new release from power-pop group Rommel, and we have a little stack of copies for y’all.

We also just got in the new Skrewball 7” on Crew Cuts records from the UK.

While we got shafted by the vinyl supplier gods on the first pressing, this time around we secured some copies of the new Descendents album 9th and Walnut, which features songs written during their early, pre-Milo Goes to College period. Even if you’re not a fan of the latter-day Descendents, fans of the band’s early years will want to check this out. It’s really good!

Finally, we have this beautifully packed new best-of collection from the almighty Undertones. Of course the first two Undertones albums are classics, but so many of their best tracks only appeared on singles and EPs, making a compilation like this a necessary part of your Undertones vinyl collection.