Shock Treatment: So Mr. Burner, what drove you to want to make music yourself as opposed to going to the local rock ‘n’ roll hot spots and doing some band recruiting? Jacket Burner: To be honest with you that decision mostly came from being a loner. I don’t have many friends (please weep for me). I guess I’ve moved around a lot in life so I’m well used to being isolated and doing my own thing. Plus having to explain songs to a bunch of other people sounds like absolute torture. Fuck that. Musicians are fuckin weirdos mostly from what I gather (myself included) Shock Treatment: Being a few years into this musical project, are you starting to feel the itch to play these songs live at all?   Jacket Burner: I’d love to play live but it would be a logistical nightmare for me. Where I live is all farmers and stupid feeble old ladies. Nobody even knows what punk rock is in this town! I think it would be a great show tho. Maximum intensity + maximum rock n roll action / posturing. If there...

Shock Treatment: So Gabriele, tell me about how you first got into punk music? Gabriele: When I was young, I started out listening to hard rock, then moved on to heavy metal and thrash metal. Around the age of 18, I met Marco Sigismondi: he sang in a local hardcore punk band called Digos Goat and also ran a fanzine called Road To Ruin. That really opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know: the DIY hardcore punk scene—black-and-white covers, self-published zines, fixed prices for records and fanzines—a completely different way of doing things that I wasn’t familiar with, partly because I was born and live in a small town in central-southern Italy. But hardcore punk made its way there too, albeit a little late, and from that moment on, things were never the same. Shock Treatment: So What made you decide to want to start the record label instead of playing in a band? Gabriele: Because back then, as a kid, I didn’t play any musical instruments and it had never even crossed my mind; some of m...

Photo by Edward Scotland Interview conducted with Quick Romance vocalist Matilda Scotland! Shock Treatment: Let’s kick things off by telling me about your first practice as a band? Did you all more or less have a sound in mind or did your current style evolve over time? Matilda: At the very start I was pretty shy around Gabe, Hayden and Ollie cos I only knew them vaguely, through school or mutual friends. Our first band practice was sorta tentative, definitely a little awkward. But fun! Thankfully, it took very little time before we were all getting on like a house on fire. They’re nice boys, my bandmates. That means a lot when you’re a teenage girl DESPERATE for people to take you seriously enough to join a band with you. We all had a vague idea of what we wanted to sound like from the offset, yeah! It’s definitely evolved since we started - I hope it will continue to! That’d be cool. Shock Treatment: Quick Romance is a pretty young band, is that fair to say? You’ve listed Fatal M...

In case you don’t know Vinyl Dog Records, here is the quick history: it was a Southern California label from the mid-90s to the mid-2010s, run by the head stitch himself, Michael Lohrman. (Aside from running the label, he fronts one of the absolute best active punk bands in the land! With the killer news that Michael is officially reactivating the label, I’m here doing a retrospective of my top 10 Vinyl Dog records. While the original catalog wasn't huge, I realized I’ve owned pretty much all of it. And yes, that includes the elusive U.S. Bombs 2x7" and the Exploding Fuck Dolls 7". I let them go for cash when times were tight years ago, and man, do I regret it today. Here's to a long, prosperous second coming for Vinyl Dog Records—because the world needs all the punk rock it can get right now! 10. Sensitive Side - Moon Kids 7" EP VD-019 (2011) You get a value packed 6 songs of pretty great anxiety riddled, abrasive, yet melodic post punk here on this one. As far...

I've heard pretty much my whole life that "rock 'n' roll" is a young man's game. Don't ask me where I heard this, because it has been in multiple places from different people. It's a phrase that has floated around in my mind ever since I was actually young. Now that I'm somewhere between middle age and certifiably "old," I still think about it every now and then. I especially think about it when I hear a band like Gatecrash, who are my age and can still crank out a brilliant debut LP such as this one. I also wonder: could this band have made such a masterful record any better if they were twenty or thirty years younger? The answer to that is no, I really don't believe so. I've also heard nonsense sayings like "age is just a number." Well, to anyone who has seen The Damned or the Circle Jerks, I think this saying might have some truth to it. I haven't seen anyone completely incinerate a room the way Keith Morris is do...

In case you missed the "Best of 2026 So Far" episode of the podcast that Josh and I do called Born Too Late, here's a quick recap. We were happy to have Niek from Add To Wantlist.com as a special guest to class up the joint. It's crazy to me how we all, more or less, listen to similar music, yet only had one duplicate record on our lists. So go ahead, dive in headfirst and take a look at what we've been adoring the last 6 months or so. I don't want to hear anyone say there isn't any good music being made anymore, because here are thirty-plus records that stand as a testament contrary to that statement. Brilliant new bands and records are still roaming the earth today. They haven't gone the way of the dinosaur quite yet. That's why it's more important than ever to support these independent bands and record labels right now, while they're still around. The Spotify playlist at the end of this post merely serves as a reference. If you like any ...