Can you imagine what AI-generated punk music would sound like? God, I think I’d have to drive my car into the nearest lake. Luckily, Panthercaps are about as human as punk gets, and there’s an inescapable human fury to “666”, the opening song to Against the Super Ego, their debut EP. It really makes me glad not to be a large language model spending my days trying my best to tell Elon he’s pretty.
The Berlin-based slow-punk trio describes themselves as “proudly unpolished,” and goddamn they’re right. The record is not a hyper-compressed, heavily produced artifact; rather, it’s a little closed in, a little naked, and it rips.
Even the album art – a stock photo starscape and a Scooby Doo font – tells us what we’re getting up front. We grok the oeuvre immediately.
“This is a robbery so hand me your money
enough meetings and bad coffee, I don’t want to work anymore“
Fans of classic punk and feminine rage will have a great time. “666” is a song about a woman losing it, about the specific genre of torture that mundane modern life is for so many of us. At the risk of plagiarizing myself in another review, this first track would crush on a Tony Hawk soundtrack (complimentary).
The bass guitar is really the best part of the song, in my opinion: Fuzzed out, driving, hard picked. Occasionally, I fantasize about selling all my electric guitar gear to get a decent bass rig, and tracks like this really make me think hard about it.
Overall review of “666”: Great song to listen to while bombing hills on a longboard (and break your arm when you take a header).
This is my first real experience with slow punk, and I have to say it’s a gay old time. 221 bpm-style punk tends to leave me behind a little bit, but there’s just enough of a dynamic drop down on this EP to keep fatigue at bay. We’re not all nineteen and full of fire, you know? It’s been a long week/month/era.
More great fuzz to be had on “Treble”: The vocal performance is a bit more polished, though we’re still far away from anything one would be tempted to call “reverb,” double-tracking, or any of the production tricks that are so commonplace in modern music. We get no sense of the room where her vocals were recorded. There’s an immediacy that makes you think she was in a shoebox or something—again, this is meant as a compliment. It’s sick to experience this level of rawness that isn’t in something historical, you know? Just because you can put reverb or compression on everything with a couple clicks doesn’t mean you have to.
“Hoo! and What Were They?” This track title made me laugh, but this is probably my favorite song on the EP. The chord structure is interesting, the guitar tones are varied, and the vocal performance from Sanam is at its most athletic.
Overall, an exciting first foray from the trio, and a bunch of songs I’d love to hear live. Take a listen to Against the Super Ego below.
Written by Willow Stonebeck
