Your favorite band’s favorite band, Cohoes New York's End of a Year Self Defense Family enjoys a distinct renown within the punk community. Well-respected and critically lauded but difficult and idiosyncratic, the band has done things their way almost to a fault. Eschewing sing-alongs and easy anthems in favor of personal lyrics, End of a Year Self Defense Family stands apart from their contemporaries in punk and hardcore. Their strangely tense guitar-work framed within otherwise hook laden songs lends the band an unmistakable sound. Opting to be heavy in emotional rather than heavy in sound.

After first gaining attention through a full-length on seminal hardcore label Revelation Records, End of a Year Self Defense Family took to the 7”EP format with a rare zeal. The result was EP’s and splits from a dozen labels in half-a-dozen countries. Genuinely uninterested in genres and expectations, End of a Year Self Defense Family released these records on a wide variety of labels while touring the world over.

Building on the post everything sound they've continued to pioneer, End of a Year Self Defense Family returns to the full-length format with boundless creative energy. "You Are Beneath Me" is the band’s most focused work to date. Expanding greatly on the recent 7"EP material they’ve built their name on. Dense and anxiety-ridden, "You Are Beneath Me" approaches punk in a hyper-personal and singularly artistic manner. Not afraid to be confrontational, honest, and pure in every way. Proving that End of a Year Self Defense Family continue to be a true breath of fresh air in today's independent music world.

This is the new project from Steve Poponi, the former lead vocalist/songwriter from the band Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start. Exploded Drawings is a sonic continuation from where Up Up Down Down left off with a nice touch of fatherly snark.

Philly psychedelic shoegaze death rockers describe themselves as sounding like "the time you saw your creepy metalhead brother at 80's night", which while hilarious is really pretty spot on. The guys are most definitely gloomy and gothy, thick Joy Division-y basslines, reverbed dramatic vox, all moody and minor key, but beyond that, they buck lots of gloom pop and goth rock convention by tethering that stuff to big muscled drum pound, clouds of wild psychedelic freakout, not to mention dense distorted guitars, cranked up, spaced out and metalized. In some ways, with the noisy guitars and thick bass, and the deep vox, they almost sound more like some super obscure Flying Nun band from the eighties, who put out one lp that no one really heard but that still pretty much destroys everything else you've heard. They also remind us of AmRep Aussies Kingsnakeroost and Lubricated Goat, that sort of noise rock blues stomp just gothed up a bit. Plus they pepper their gloomy crush with blasts of almost punk sounding crunch, which makes them seem even heavier when they slip back into the churn and pound. For fans of gloomy heaviness, metallic gothrock, psychedelic shoegaze deathrock and other sonically similar genres we just made up.