Power Pop

New album: K7s || Take 2

The latest Stardumb classic

By / / Power Pop, Punk / Leave a Comment

Stardumb Records has been around for more than 25 years already, and while the label started with a clear focus on pop punk, its roster in 2026 has a much broader range. There’s classic power pop from The Speedways, indie punk from Lone Wolf, and plenty of room for pop punk and power pop songsmiths like James Sullivan and Lanny Durbin (as Local Drags) to show just how far you can stretch a good pop song.

But Take 2, the label’s latest LP from K7s? This is the kind of record that would have felt just as at home on Stardumb in the early ’00s as it does in 2026.

K7s are Spain’s version of the pop punk supergroup, fronted by Luis Sanchez (Depressing Claim and Los Reactivos) and featuring Israel Adelantado (Shock Treatment), Raul Artana and Kurt Baker. Their 2018 debut was called Take 1, but the last time I heard from the band was in 2021, when they released a marvelous full-album version of the Ramones’ Mondo Bizarro.

In a sense, Take 2 almost feels like a cover album too. The songs are so sweet, the hooks so perfectly placed, that it feels like this material has already been road-tested to perfection. K7s don’t need speed, gimmicks or sonic fireworks to stand out. They have songs. Really good ones. The kind that sound instantly familiar, feel completely natural and get stuck in your head before you’ve figured out where you’ve heard them before. Take 2 is a masterclass in making great pop punk look ridiculously easy.

The record comes with super fun artwork by Stefan Stardumb himself that makes me wonder if he secretly dreams of creating his own comic book about the adventures of K7s. I sure hope so, especially if the band is providing the soundtrack!

Take 2 is available now on LP and CD from Stardumb and Water slide Records.



Add to wantlist: Stardumb

New split EP: Lava Fangs || Nothing Better/Get Together & Benny J Ward || Short Lived/Watch Outside

Four songs, zero chance of getting them out of your head

By / / Garage Rock, Power Pop / Leave a Comment

Longtime friends and Cheersquad label mates Lava Fangs (Jamie Coghill, Wesley Fahey, Andrew Horne, and Stu Manchu, from Melbourne) and Benny J Ward (nowadays residing in the Perth Hills) teamed up for a must-have split 7″ that sounds like musicians having a damn good time, both sides offering two reasons to flip the record.

Lava Fangs delivers punchy power pop earworms Nothing Better and Get Together, both as catchy as can be (“Let’s go, let’s get it on, oh yeah”). Benny J Ward, whose Super! LP made it to my 2025 year-end list, gives Mono Men’s Watch Outside a jangly and lo-fi makeover, followed by the infectious original Short Lived. These are four hits with hooks that make smiling a reflex.


Nothing Better/Get Together b/w Short Lived/Watch Outside is out digitally and on 7″ vinyl through Cheersquad Records & Tapes.

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

New compilation: The Morning Line || Stars

The past in the rear-view mirror, the road still wide open

By / / Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Power Pop / Leave a Comment

San Francisco power pop quartet The Morning Line on Burbank quality label Big Stir Records, that sounds like a symbiotic partnership that was inevitable. Matching the ethics on both sides, band members Stephen Smith, Brian Mello, David Knupp, and Peter Craft didn’t simply assemble a ‘best of’ package from their work over the past two decades. Instead, Stars brings remixed versions of their personal picks, as well as new singles 90s Pickup and This Lens, a collection diverse in character without ever losing its sense of cohesion.

The 21 tracks hop between alternative rock, jangle pop, post-punk, and Americana, as if Elvis Costello, Teenage Fanclub, and Sugar had merged. The commanding, emotionally charged vocals hold the shifting textures together, whether the band is pushing forward on propulsive guitar rock or slowing down for something more reflective, along roads and places towards the urge to start again. The past may provide the material here, with many songs worth rediscovering, but the momentum belongs entirely to the present.




Stars is out digitally and on CD through Big Stir Records. All songs are written by Stephen Smith, and recorded and mixed by Peter Craft.

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp || Big Stir || The Orchard

New album: Nonchalant || When I Lost My Heart

Teenage hearts from Freiburg

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Nonchalant may look like a gang of street punks, and they are indeed made up of several Oi! aficionados from the Freiburg scene (Nowitschok, Drinking Squad, The Lads). So naturally, their new album is about… falling in love, growing up and discovering who you are. Eh…Street punk this is not. No fascist regimes are attacked, no working-class uprising is plotted. Instead, When I Lost My Heart is packed with ridiculously infectious pop punk built on a late-’70s foundation, with dashes of ’80s new wave, pop melodies and a synth undercurrent.

Nonchalant don’t sound particularly agitated either. They play with their eyes and hearts wide open, and sing these songs with such pure enthusiasm that it’s hard not to get swept up in it. The band revisit their teenage years and all the complicated stuff that comes with them: finding your identity and your passions (like music!), getting your heart broken, and dreaming about new love. It’s a concept record of sorts, and it fits the music rather perfect.

That opening salvo of Prettiest Girl In Town and Teenage Heart feels completely out of time in 2026, which makes it even more glorious. You’ll be singing along within seconds. I’ll admit that, after such a strong start, I expected the record to take a nosedive eventually. You know what? The hits keep coming. One ridiculously catchy song after another, until you reach the back cover’s promise that Nonchalant hopes you’ll discover you’re still a teenager at heart.

They’re onto something. I can definitely see teenagers of all ages going wild for this one.

When I Lost My Heart is out now on Punkrock Boys and Contra Records.



Add to wantlist: Bandcamp || Contra

New album: Dany Laj And The Looks || If Looks Could Kill

Power pop for people who need another song to sing to

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When Dany Laj sings “we heard this song a million times, we need another one to sing to,” we feel seen. When he sings “We’re The Freaks, making all the noise,” we know he is one of us. His decisions when it comes to sports teams he supports may be questionable, but at least he has excellent taste in catchy little guitar tunes.

And there are plenty of those on If Looks Could Kill. Dany Laj is in fine form, decking out one power pop hit after another, and they are no small potatoes. Shelved to Falling Through The Cracks are about twice the length of what I normally regard as a power pop hit, and the stunning 5-minute closer Till The End is another example, but I’ll allow it. Great songwriting deserves a little extra time, and these songs certainly aren’t pulling at my increasingly short attention span.

There’s something wonderfully out of step about this kind of music in 2026. Dany Laj writes about the weird conundrum that is modern life, what it does to communities, our culture and the spaces we inhabit, yet the music itself is blissfully uninterested in being hip. You might expect this sort of rock-‘n’-roll to slowly go extinct in a world being taken over by robots, but somehow the opposite seems to be happening. Maybe the robots haven’t figured out power pop yet. Fingers crossed.

I have heard that Dany fell in love with playing music again while writing these songs, originally intended to become a solo record. But Dany operates best in a team, so cue Jeanette Dowling and David Laplante to turn this into a full-band affair. It sounds like a band having a great time making a record, which is probably why I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it all weekend.

If Looks Could Kill has also got me dreaming of a small-venue festival that somehow manages to book Dany Laj And The Looks alongside Josephine Network, The Lemon Twigs, Music City, Daniel Romano’s Outfit and The Speedways. I would buy that ticket immediately. In fact, I’m pretty sure I just described my ideal weekend.

If Looks Could Kill is out now on Having Fun Records (We Are Busy Bodies).


Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

New album: Space Jaguar || Command Post

Wonderful jangly power pop with an oddly specific time stamp

By / / Alternative Rock, Jangle Pop, Power Pop / Leave a Comment

Space Jaguar’s 2025 debut album, If You Play Expect To Pay, was Mark Grassick’s love letter to 1993’s guitar (power) pop scene. The inspiration for its follow-up, Command Post, is a ten-song dose of jangly, hook-filled guitar pop that aims to bottle the magic of the 1993 Reading Festival, whose line-up (take a deep breath) included Big Star, The Lemonheads, Paul Westerberg, Juliana Hatfield, Bettie Serveert, Gigolo Aunts and The Posies, among many more.

In Space Jaguar’s universe, songwriting always trumps appearance. Grassick, together with Andrew Taylor (Dropkick, The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness) and Michael Wood, keeps things lean and lets the harmonies do their work. The sound will feel familiar to anyone who fell for If You Play Expect To Pay: ringing guitars, sweet melodies and that unmistakable ’90s glow. This time, though, the songs hit with a little more clarity and immediacy.

The fine jangly guitars and vocal hooks arrive quickly in these concise, warm tunes that don’t hang around longer than they need to. A couple of songs in, and if that time machine ever gets built, Space Jaguar joining the 1993 Reading Festival line-up starts to look increasingly likely.


Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

Album review: Nice Shirt || We Deserve Love Too

Economics, awkwardness, and guitars in dialogue

By / / Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Power Pop / Leave a Comment

Nice Shirt is a new art rock trio, based in Brooklyn by way of Atlanta. They make their debut with We Deserve Love Too, and there is every reason to give in to it. Look at the quirky cover art, check out the Crying For Two Seconds video below (somewhat reminiscent of the visuals from the How To with John Wilson series), but above all, listen to how they make their mark in just a minute and a half with the telling opening track, Hello. It’s a killer first move, setting the whole thing in motion.

By their own account, they “sound a bit like a Minutemen cover band playing a B-tier Athens frat party during Obama’s second term, but even more like The Apples in Stereo if they were Gowanus-based procurement analysts.” Listening to the twelve songs here, references like Vampire Weekend, Grandaddy, and Weezer also come to mind, but this mix of indie rock, power pop, new wave, psych-funk, and egg punk is actually too idiosyncratic and versatile for that to make any sense.

Guitars that zig where you expect them to zag, rhythms that make it difficult to sit still, and vocals delivering every witty line with a wink, give this album a wonderfully skewed personality that ideed is worth receiving a lot of love. I’d be surprised if that won’t happen.



We Deserve Love Too is out digitally via Intelligence Community. Featuring Sammy Sbiti (guitar, vocals), Larson Collier (bass, vocals), and Robert Van Cleave (drums, vocals).

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

New single: The Ific || Never Going Back

Two shots of garage-fuelled power pop

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We begged for more after hearing Wrong Way b/w Flakin’ Out, The Ific’s debut 7″ that made it onto my 2023 year-end list (followed by the Meet The Ific LP in 2024, only released via streaming services, as far as I know). Thanks to Rogue Records, purveyor of cool garage rock 45s, we now get more. And what a treat it is.

The four rock ‘n’ roll veterans from the San Francisco Bay Area not only know how to write hits, but even more how to perform them on stage. Two new doses of high-energy power pop bring some of that live-wire magic to the turntable. Never Going Back scores with mid-60s garage grit, pounding drums, razor-sharp guitars, and a chorus that immediately invites you to sing along. B-side You, Yes You has the same building blocks, but is incredibly even catchier. Wild hearts with sharp hooks, I’m caught.


Never Going Back b/w You, Yes You is out digitally, also available on 7″ vinyl from September 29, through Rogue Records.

Add to want list: Bandcamp

PS
A new LP, Here Are The Ific will be released in January 2027 on Area Pirata Records.

New album: The Goods || Goodbye Summertime

Sunshine, with a chance of melancholy on The Goods' most ambitious record to date

By / / Indie Pop, Jangle Pop, Power Pop, Psych / Leave a Comment

The weather forecast: plenty of sunshine, partly cloudy, an unexpectedly fine late-summer day, with a chance of melancholy.

It’s hard not to think about the weather while listening to the second LP from The Goods. This is the weather my brain recreates. It’s in the title, the warmth of the sound, the timeless pop melodies, the crisp guitars, and the sequencing, which ebbs and flows between quieter moments and faster ones. We loved The Goods’ debut LP, released less than a year ago, but Goodbye Summertime displays a level of ambition and sonic richness that’s remarkable. The Goods stretch beyond power pop, bringing in jangle and psych-pop influences and moving further into Lemon Twigs territory.

Rob Good is in a period of his life when his output is insane in both size and quality. Earlier this year, he was part of that fantastic new Yea-Ming And The Rumours LP, and he often lends his talents to recording or playing with his other Bay Area scene buddies. And still, he finds the time to work on The Goods.

Goodbye Summertime came together during a particularly creative, and emotionally complicated, moment in Good’s life. I imagine him living in his studio, surrounded by favorite records from the ’60s and ’70s (or perhaps from the ’90s as well), constantly picking up his guitar, putting thoughts on paper, and demoing bits and pieces. Then cutting the bad parts and sharpening the good ones. The result has the incredible ease of a record that its artist has worked hard to construct so carefully that we barely notice the effort it takes to write songs this good.

Few guitar-pop records this year start as strongly. Lazy and Love You More sound like hits that AM radio could slide in easily between The Beatles and The Beach Boys, while Summer’s Almost Gone is classic Bay Area jangle pop. Wing takes an unexpected turn (spoiler alert) into a very Beach Boys-esque interlude. There are so many songs here that sound like stone-cold classics, but the real achievement is how naturally they sit together. The clouds may roll in, but Goodbye Summertime leaves you with plenty of sunshine. It is out today on Dandy Boy Records.

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

New album: The Naggs || The Naggs Generation

Garage power pop ’n’ roll, with excellent taste

By / / Garage Rock, Power Pop / Leave a Comment

On their 2023 debut EP, I described The Naggs as Germany’s answer to the Pale Lips. Three years later, the Düsseldorf band make their full-length debut. That description still holds, which makes sense given that 80% of the EP appears on the LP. But it’s probably best to call them what they are: a classic garage power pop ’n’ roll band.

In practice, that means roughly 50% Naggs and 50% songs by other people they love dearly. Among the eleven tracks are covers of Teenage Head’s Picture My Face, The Meanies’ It’s True, The Sidewalks’ Nice Guys and Protex’s Don’t Ring Me Up. My absolute favorite reconstructed song, though, is their take on Les Calamités’ Toutes Les Nuits. What a hit!

That many covers may be a bit much for some, but to my ears they sit comfortably alongside The Naggs’ own material. And honestly, I don’t think The Naggs are interested in being original at all. Somehow, they still sound like true originals.

The Naggs Generation is available from Pomegranate and Soundflat. While the record is not on Bandcamp yet, You’ll should be able to stream it on the service you subscribe to.

Add to wantlist: Soundflat

 

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