Some thirteen years ago, I interviewed Tony Molina for this very blog, and when I came up with the idea for this new Worst Song series, he was high on my list of hopeful contributors. His discography runs deep, with a list of songwriting credits that must run into three figures, and as his quality has always run high, I was dying to know what he felt worst about. Tony has taken a strict anti-social media, anti-internet, anti-promotion stance for a few years now, and it was only him wanting to “own up to making bad music” (his words, not mine!) that he decided to participate. I do miss his online banter (he once described a Trump vs. Clinton presidential debate as “two fools who have never heard Excruciating Terror”), though I am thankful for his wonderful music and the inspiration to throw my phone in a lake, or at least turn my laptop off once in a while. His worst song can be found here.
YGR: Alright – so why is “No One Told He” your worst song?
TM: Before we get into that, we should start with that I got sober in August of 2022 and am still sober today, no alcohol, no drugs, and I even quit cigs in July of last year. I think this song was written in 2014 when my drinking took an ugly-ass turn, as it did all the time, progressively, until I quit. I was real faded and very sick in all aspects when this song came about. I think at the time in my barely-functioning, cooked-ass brain I thought I was doing some kind of ‘68 Beatles / George Harrison nod with this one. Now in 2026, I have the mental clarity to realize that this song is more of a nightmare early ’70s soft rock AM radio, Crosby Stills & Nash, barefoot-bearded guy, CIA plant, hanging in the Canyon asshole nightmare song from hell. Basically everything gross, swagless and bad is front and center in this song.
There’s a part in the Stooges doc where Iggy is talking about The Stooges being a direct response to the late ’60s hippie-lite, boardroom-created, sellout federal-agent music that “still smells”. This song is totally coming from those things Iggy and co. were railing against.
YGR: As a sober person, are you happier with your songwriting in general? Or is that not a significant influence in the quality of your work either way, and it just happened to take a wrong turn for you here?
TM: No, I made a lot of bad music in my drinking years, I just think this one is number one. One character defect I can tell you about is that when I was drinking, bad music would find its way into my life. There’s a lot of manipulating factors out there, if you go on the internet at any time there’s a million people on there trying to sell you objectively bad music and then trying to manipulate you into believing it is good. And then you got played! I think I just didn’t have the mental clarity or intuition or any real ability to know what was what back then. I quit social-media for good in 2016, so those two things – being offline and sobriety – restored my overall focus, taste, ability, work ethic, and I also got more serious about record collecting and digging deeper and educating myself on music more than making music myself, all those things times ten. It’s like night and day, the difference.
YGR: This feels like sage advice, no joke. Any tips for those who want to kick social media (or drugs) but don’t feel empowered enough to do so?
TM: I think the first thing is understanding that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, the Spotify slimebag, Jack Dorsey, and any / all of these techie gentrifier colonizer pigs are true scum of the earth that do not have anyone’s best interest in mind. They one-hundred percent are trying to keep you addicted, manipulated and powerless, they will rob you of your dignity and integrity, strip you of your desire for honest and true self-expression, condition you to prioritize capital instead of the spiritual value of art. They will condition you to publicly log your character defects to the world, they will erase and wipe out real culture and replace it with swagless garbage, they will make your band suck ass and you will be spending your days thinking of ways to sell the shitty record you made to the public instead of writing real songs; they will sell you garbage and essentially give you brain disease for the rest of your natural life. Nobody needs it for anything, especially your band. I completely stay away from the internet and I’m doing better than ever – I even started a record label extremely recently (Olde Fade Productionz) with no social media or Bandcamp and the orders haven’t stopped coming in for weeks now. And I’m a cooked middle-aged dude at this point, I’m nothing special, so just like sobriety, if I can do it, anyone can. Only a manipulator who is trying to sway the narrative to get something from you is going to tell you otherwise.
Kind of a Polyvinyl-ish emo name for a project, but Bitter Fictions takes a far more conceptual route to your heart. It’s the guise of one Devin Friesen, a Canadian who begins with his guitar and discovers what curious new delights might bloom from it (like one of those mail-order mushroom logs). Opener “Sapphire” wrings a mysterious ringtone out of his guitar as a soft electronic tumble offers some sense of momentum, almost like that Richard Youngs “techno” record, whereas “Garnet” delivers nearly ten minutes of shimmering guitar improvisations. Maybe it is kind of emo, in that if you were able to capture the actual underlying guitar melodies of “Garnet” and “Aquamarine” like fireflies in a jar and hand them to American Football, they could probably construct a suitable living arrangement. Bitter Fictions has been opening for Body/Head and Merzbow, though, so he celebrates those rougher textures as well, like the out-of-nowhere synth zaps on “Aquamarine” and the thick palisade of noise-guitar that sends the side-long title track tumbling from the clear night sky deep into the muck below. The aggression points to Ben Frost, whereas the fragility points to Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, ready to be purchased with currency that points to Canada.
You know how there’s that Plantasia album of synth music you’re supposed to play for your plants? I’m recommending that you play Cancer House’s debut album The Moth for all the neglected, dying and dead plants in your home, not in hopes of healing them but as a somber farewell before you toss them in with the weekly trash. This is deeply unwatered music with no sign of natural light: guitars, banjos, violin, drums and bass-guitar are plucked with deep remorse, resulting in an updated version of emo that harnesses the scalding bleakness of black metal without any of its other aesthetic signifiers. It’s like the mysterious sounds of Don Martin Three rendered even more inscrutable by the post-rock innovation of Gastr Del Sol, and as it’s released on a label known more for ultramodern ambient/techno electronics than guitar bands (they might be the only one?), there’s a sense of that experimental abstraction in here, too. As you might expect, The Moth is kind of an uncomfortable place to dwell, but once you get a feel for the pitch-shifted vocals, tape-hissing samples and the way that Cancer House seamlessly tailors it all (see the beautiful “Flowers Over There”, it’s like Moss Icon living inside of Grouper’s haunted attic), you might want to linger long past closing hours. Cancer House’s music is divinely morose and frightened, and appropriately enough, it feels like the near future.
No sooner were Ghösh gaining momentum in the digital-hardcore clown-rave scene (look it up) than they vanished in a puff of green smoke, leaving Zachary Fairbrother to reconfigure himself as Countach. Once you feel the pull away from guitar bands and into Detroit-style acid synth arpeggios, it’s a craving that cannot be ignored, and that’s precisely where Fairbrother is at with Countach. These four tracks are DIY dance-floor munitions, teeth bared and ready to jack. “Feel The Power” establishes the parameters – acid-on-acid crunch, diabolical vocal sample – before my favorite of the EP, “Any Other Way”. Featuring the charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent of none other than Morgan Garrett, Garrett’s bloodshot deadpan over Countach’s gated electro-rhythms recalls another Philadelphian original, M Ax Noi Mach. Garrett has been more than ready for his “Jesus Built My Hotrod” moment and this very well could be it. “Gauntlet” goes full-throttle ascending-acid, receding only for a quick Legend Of Zelda breather, just long enough to cast your die before the ogre awakes. “Who Is In Control?” swings from the windows to the wall, classic 303 and 808 sounds that result in involuntary screwface when the sampled guitar solo hits in classic Bomb Squad fashion. Feel The Four should’ve pressed some of these on old-timey shellac discs, so you can shatter it over your own head after listening. 
Like a handful of other forward-thinking post-dubstep producers (Guy Brewer AKA Carrier immediately comes to mind), Dave Huismans’s decision to pause old monikers (in his case, 2562 and A Made Up Sound) and rebrand with a fresh new image has succeeded. His self-released series of EPs under the guise of ex_libris are flying off the Bandcamp shelves (and onto Discogs for inflated prices), and it’s not hard to see why: he’s pursuing a more uniquely personal sound and has graced these records with an individualized touch. Continuing with the attractive Pantone color schemes and a dash of hand-stamped abstraction, this third installment is comforting, soft-spoken and begging to be played over and over. “#6-27 (untangled)” opens with a gauzy puff redolent of the Music From Memory label before its gears start to turn. It’s got that sense of sweet European strangeness I’d associate with early ’80s records from Michael Rother and Mœbius & Plank, but the ex_libris screen is filtered to remove all warts and wrinkles – if it was a bed at the group Airbnb, everyone would be trying to claim it. “#7 (cosmic ripples)” moves in more of an outlandish dub-techno direction, like a Pole record comprised of carnival sounds, or Augustus Pablo getting a new high score on Cruis’n Outer Space (an arcade racing game I have just now invented). Across nine minutes, it folds back into open-air bliss, giving way to “#31 (reprise)”, freaked-out effects unmoored from grid-based time and loving it. Huismans is not short on dub/ambient/techno experience, and in this most humble and relaxed mode, we are treated to his brightest side yet. 
Peak Oil’s commitment to top-shelf electronic music is unwavering, and the people know it – rarely will one of their releases remain available to purchase on Bandcamp for long. Architectonics is Russian producer Hoavi’s second for the label, and it hits on a sweet spot, blatant catnip for those of us who seek the head-rush that comes from richly detailed electronic rhythms. Wielding the sword and mace of today’s experimental vanguard – his phone and a contact mic – Hoavi built up a formidable library of percussive effects, ran them through enough filters and software systems so as to no longer resemble their source material, and built out impressive webs of Gamelan-inspired rhythms. The tracks are as overactive and dazzling as any Nonesuch collection of Gamelan recordings, and while he could’ve tipped it over into some sort of hyper-real IDM zone clearly beyond human capacity, these eleven tracks feel like they exist within our earthly realm, just a highly stylized version of it… Avatar-ready rave music. It falls between the ruminative pacing of De Leon and the alien-native rhythms of Shackleton, and while the conceptual boundaries are firm, there’s plenty of room to play. “After The Cyclone”, for example, stirs up some unconventional horn sounds, a flock of gulls soaring through a thicket of interlocking percussion that would make Philip Glass blush. Hoavi created a richly detailed world, and we owe it to him to explore. 
“We have invented nothing, nor are we interested in doing so.” The English translation of the title of this new (and final?) Ignorantes album brings a tear to my eye. So eloquent! So righteous! Their Chilean punk rock is mid-tempo (very pogo-friendly) and inherently raw, a timeless tradition that rejects innovation in favor of stinking, pulsating immediacy. No Hemos was recorded in 2021 and left to languish in a digital-only Bandcamp purgatory until now, and I’ll admit that I wouldn’t have noticed had General Speech not stepped up to the plate with this appealing vinyl edition. It’s so difficult to make simplicity sound so thrilling, but the two-note riff that comprises “No Tenemos Propuesta” has me hammering all nearby flat surfaces with my fists like an idiot. “Sapos” manages to mimic note-for-note obscure ’90s crusters Vile Horrendous’s “Dead Nazis Don’t Hate”, a melody that sounds fantastic when either band does it. With seven straightforward attacks and a lengthier, spookier closing song, it’s the perfect length for the perfect form of music. For fans of Peggio Punx, Germ Attak, Crazy Spirit, Kangrena, B.G.K., Confuse, Blazing Eye… (please send SASE for complete 4,526 for-fans-of band list).
News of a new Index For Working Musik album is met with jubilation around my neck of the woods, but not so fast – it turns out Bunker Intimations II was originally released as an enticing enhancement to a deluxe edition of last year’s Which Direction Goes The Beam. My copy of that album was a plain ol’ regular one, so I missed out on the limited cassette that came along with it, that is until Tough Love issued it, standalone and on vinyl, as Bunker Intimations II. Apparently recorded under self-imposed duress – written (actually scratch that, improvised), recorded and mixed in three days – these lengthy instrumentals diverge from the already-divergent style I’ve come to associate with this bold post-punk group. It’s as loose-limbed and unresolved as you might expect from such creative limitations, group-jams without a clear leader, evocative atmospheres if no distinct sense of purpose. As an add-on to Which Direction Goes The Beam, it’s a treat, a little “Director’s Commentary”-style bonus for infatuated fans to dig even deeper, but it’s not leaving much of an impression on me from its own merit, certainly not the way their ‘real’ albums have. With a scant two hundred and fifty copies pressed, I am certain there are enough loving homes to go around – maybe in a few months I’ll stop by for another visit. 
Nice to see Neil Burke’s day-glo imaginary landscapes all over this new Microwaves album. For decades now, if his art graced the record cover, it offered a seal of weirdo-punk authenticity – it’s uncompromising in a way you have to respect, even if it ends up on something as nonsensical as the Towel eight-inch EP on Vermiform (though Burke only “art directed” that one, to be fair). Microwaves are an underground institution as well, Pittsburgh guys-with-jobs who never really seem to have toured in their twenty-five-year-plus career and don’t seem particularly pressed about it either. Even after all these years, Temporal Shifter stays true to the root cause, one where bass and drums dig Melvins-sized ditches as the guitar dabbles in math-rock and metal of all stripes (even hair-). Guitarist/vocalist David Kuzy often sounds like he’s trying out for Van Halen by playing various Castlevania themes, all while his two compatriots barely notice, so deeply locked into their airtight post-hardcore grooves they must eventually turn blue in the face. Personally, I like it when they go off the deep end a little – I think it’s the hidden track on their debut System 2 where a pitched-up voice keeps giggling out the phrase “he took a picture of blood!”, a musical moment that comes to my mind way more than it should – but Temporal Shifter is a proud display of noise-rock muscle and bone. If they’re suffering from arthritis at this advanced stage, the meds are doing a great job of hiding it. 
Local Boys Make Bad: Philly’s My Wife’s An Angel continue to shine a light on the most abhorrent personality types with their second full-length, commonly referred to as KHIATFKM (y’know, like TAGABOW). Their debut album was a clean way to experience a deeply messy band – you could listen at home without fear of vocalist Garrett Stanton Vandemark tying you up with his mic cord and hanging you upside down – and they lean into that filthy underbelly of blue-collar city living here. Their music is ninety-percent Landed and ten-percent TAD – it’s a thrillingly toxic cocktail, like the neon-swamp liquid that collects in the bottom of a dive bar’s trash bin, and for some reason My Wife’s An Angel took a sip without waiting for someone to dare them. Over these inebriated noise-rock riffs (and splattered with infernal sound effects), Stanton Vandemark goes full-method with his character portrayals, a rogue’s gallery of the absolute worst guys at the bar. I can practically smell the coke addict who refuses to pay rent to his parents, the Eagles fan who failed the background check to get the mall security job, the ex-jock hopped up on testosterone cream and ZYNs who refuses to believe all his money is gone… Stanton Vandermark commits like DeNiro in Taxi Driver to his impressions of these heinous men, and I sincerely hope he’s been able to find his way back out. He was recently spotted army-crawling across the city with a GoPro on his head (I’m not joking, it’s floating on the web) – if he turned his limitless energy towards high-definition AI mapping, we’d all be getting around town in driverless hover-pods by now.
With sub-genres splintering into sub-sub-genres as artists hope to claim their own hyper-specific niche, it’s kind of refreshing to be met with an all-purpose goth record like Night Of The Hunter. The group hails from the vampire capital of the USA, Los Angeles, and they even have names that read like the character list of an episode of The Vampire Diaries: (the human) Jeff Browning along with the mononymic (both undead) Ezrah and Thorson (with Aradia (demon prophet) providing guest vocals on “Safe Inside The Storm”). Over eight tracks, Night Of The Hunter cover a lot of stylistic ground, not mixing it up so much as doling it out separately, like a mixtape to satisfy all of their nocturnal denizens. Their sound lurks in the ’90s for sure, with overt similarities to Machines Of Loving Grace, Marilyn Manson and Black Tape For A Blue Girl, especially when the guitars kick in. Other more synth-forward tracks recall Balaclavas, Nine Inch Nails and November Növelet, and not simply because there’s no way I could make it through this entire review without at least one umlaut. It’s over-the-top dramatic in the way that goth should be, a caricature of wicked lust delivered with the self-seriousness you’ve come to expect from people who, if they haven’t purchased their own bespoke dental fangs, have at least given it some thought. 
Copenhagen’s hottest artist is a contested field, but Copenhagen’s weirdest has gotta be No Nose. They’re friends first, band second, a pointedly guitar-less rock group (bass, drums, keyboard, vocals) who are keen to take a silly idea and run with it, trip over it, get up and run with it some more. They’ll repeat “I lost my credit card” (on “Creditcard”) like they’re trying to seduce you, chant “CIA invented the dentist” like they’re rooting for their favorite football club (“Ciainventedthedentist”), and fill up any empty space with plenty of boldly off-key trumpet. One solid night at the pub spent shouting hilarious and bad ideas at each other could have spawned the entirety of Party In The Sky. Is “The Lowtalker” Carla dal Forno with a Residents infatuation? Party In The Sky is kind of like late ’80s Butthole Surfers in the way that it frequently misses, but then you wonder, was missing the actual point? And further like Butthole Surfers, it never feels as though No Nose are pandering for our acceptance, or even giving us a foot in the door to laugh along with them. We are voyeurs at best, trying to make heads or tails of these sleepy dub-, indie-, space-rock tunes that go on for way too long, provoked only by No Nose’s indifference to provocation. 
Another obscure UK DIY group finally gets their roses: this time it’s Twickenham’s Scissor Fits, care of the well-considered Minimum Table Stacks label. The bald femme that graces the cover of both of their 1979 EPs is cover-bound once again, dealing both previously-released EPs along with a comp track and a handful of unreleased tunes. Scissor Fits were clearly a fun band to be around, as they offered both the jouissance of immature knucklehead humor and the well-rehearsed chops of a headlining local band. Scissor Fits were too good to pretend to be bad, so they wrote a bunch of charmingly spunky, mid-tempo rock tunes, clearly aware of NME-favored outcasts like The Magic Band and Ian Dury, though they mostly kept things crowd-pleasingly in the pocket like then-contemporaries Dry Rib and Television Personalities. They didn’t make it easy on everyone, though, happily spoiling their otherwise respectable songs with lyrics and titles like “I Wish I Hadn’t Shaved My Pubic Hair Off”, “D.H. Lawrence Wasn’t A Mexican” and their all-timer, “I Don’t Want To Work For British Airways”. Every small town had its own Frank Zappas and Johnny Rottens in the late ’70s, and Scissor Fits clearly had a ball thumbing their noses at the established decorum of the day, made available again here for the delight of today’s DIY post-punk enthusiasts. The insert comes with a tender little “current whereabouts” update on the band’s members (all impressively still alive!), but I won’t spoil for you which two are currently playing in bands with their sons – you’ll have to pick up a copy for yourself.
It would seem that Ohio’s punk underground no longer allows for idle spectators – if you haven’t gotten a band going, they simply assign you one, like teams in gym class. I’m not complaining, though, as Cleveland and Cincinnati are hotbeds of punk-related energy, with Suitors being one of the newest to be delivered from Feel It’s soft palms. They already seem to know what they want to go for, and that’s the kind of edgy middlebrow zone of today’s cool non-shoegaze rock sounds. I’m talking Wet Leg, Dry Cleaning, Mannequin Pussy, heterogeneous underground stars that balance melody with discordance, probably adore The Cure, wield deadpan sarcasm like a knife and re-imagine a ’90s post-grunge era that wasn’t just dudes with pointy goatees and frosted tips celebrating misogyny and abuse. At times, I’m hearing Helium if they played like a punk band, and on certain songs (let’s say “Televangelist”) Suitor remind me a whole lot of that last Priests album, if perhaps a bit more technically solid (no offense, Priests, I’m sure you understand). It’s like Chaotic Good “indie”-rock without the unpleasant sense that you’ve been gamified by a wave of algorithm-shifting bots, because we all know that Feel It would never do us dirty like that… at least until Marvel throws them a million dollars to license “I’m An Adult Baby” by Vanilla Poppers. Only a matter of time.
Every region of the world has its own signature export: Southern Europe’s red wine, East Africa’s coffee beans, the United States of America’s imperialist violence, and Northern Europe’s black metal. Black metal is like ninety percent of Finland’s GDP the last time I checked (the other ten percent is Angry Birds), and even when you think you’ve found a safe space, like the Estonian left-field dance label Porridge Bullet, this classic corpse-painted aesthetic will sneak up and deliver a jump-scare. Tapetud Rott is a new project from Estonian dub maestro Robert Nikolajev and Mikk Madisson, and while its origins may be digital in nature, the results are as grim and frostbitten as the wolf on the cover of Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal. “See Mees” is grueling and miserable, a theatrically-heightened despair that may appeal to fans of Dom Fernow’s various attempts at black metal. “Lähme Õue” picks up the pace with traditional helicopter-chop black metal drumming (of a digital nature) and guitars as brittle and unpleasant as permafrost’s crispy outer layer. It’s over in a blip, and to what end, I’m not certain, as this EP seems predestined to miss its aesthetically-aligned audience, what being distributed by European dance-hub Rush Hour and all. The cover’s nod towards a homoerotic black-metal fan-fic further muddles Tapetud Rott’s intentions – is it sincere, or a Limp Wrist-ified gag, or simply their civic duty? 
The hardest working drummer in improvised showbiz linked up with an unorthodox techno genius and the results are understandably spectacular. Apparently borne of some sort of museum-sponsored collaboration (cool progressive arts funding inconceivable to us Americans), the duo literally wandered the museum recording “improvised percussive sounds”, the seed from which Seismo sprouted. Neither Upsammy nor Valentina Magaletti are ever short on inspiration when it comes to seeking out unexpected rhythmic pathways, and while I would’ve been happy with a live, one-take improvisation from the two, Seismo is clearly an orchestrated affair, in line with Upsammy’s modern refresh of Aphex Twin’s braindance techniques and Drexciya’s thermal hydraulics. Here, we get Magaletti’s nimble and inventive drums in various designs, from spicy-hot trap-kit fills to patterns and sources less easily discerned. It’s a vibrant haul of ingredients for Upsammy to cook up her high-speed twinkle jams, and cook she does – “Superimposed” sounds like Eli Keszler trying out for Mahavishnu Orchestra; “Mementoes” is a postmodern anime dream in the clouds. It’s technically advanced and exquisite yet easy to appreciate, and if you want the true museum experience, you can ask a friend to stand in the corner in a cheap suit and stare at you disapprovingly while you listen. 
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