Here’s a textbook case of a band name matching their sound. Montreal’s Dirty Cheetah may not shatter land-speed records (Buzz Cult took four years to make), but they carry a feral energy that can’t be caged. Their garage punk rock has grit and glam smeared all over it—sleazy in the best way, yet delivered with cool precision. They sound like they could torch Max’s Kansas City if they’d been dropped into another era, yet this record feels firmly 2025: a band trying to wrestle meaning out of a mess of algorithms, corruption, and creeping despair.

Dirty Cheetah lash out at fascists, call themselves out on carbon footprints and toxic masculinity, and instead of numbing out on chemical escape hatches, they weaponize frustration into riffs, hooks, and snarls. Dirty Cheetah may play the role of untamed rock ’n’ rollers, but Buzz Cult proves there’s far more bite beneath the swagger.

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