PNKSLM Vinyl, CD & Tape 18 Items

7ebra is the project of 25-year-old twin sisters Inez and Ella from Malmö, who grew up playing music together. Inez plays electric guitar and sings, Ella plays a keyboard, organ and Mellotron - whilst manually playing drum samples with her feet - as they both sing haunting harmonies in a way that only twins can. Beautiful but punk, minimalist but epic. The duo are making big waves across Europe already, having toured with Future Islands and The Dandy Warhols as well as the Left Of The Dial festival in Netherlands.

The “I Have a Lot to Say / If I Ask Her” 7’’ collects the duos first two singles and is available in just 100 indie exclusive copies besides the Rough Trade exclusive marbled vinyl. Their debut album will be out in the spring of 2023 via Pnkslm Recordings (ShitKid, Yung, Magic Potion etc.) and is just as the 7’’ produced by Tore Johansson, the legendary producer behind indie royalty such as The Cardigans and Franz Ferdinand.

On their bold and brilliant debut album 'Unsoothing Interior', Stockholm's Vero reflect the nature of life itself. Their songs prioritise feeling over perfectionism - what feels, or sounds, best - creating a record that tumbles through its contents with a sense of unpredictability, excitement and curiosity. It's an album full of raw guitar riffs that spin and swirl and fizz, and evoke the spirit of artists like Sonic Youth, Garbage and Pixies. The record, out May 6th via Pnkslm Recordings (ShitKid, Les Big Byrd, Holy etc.), is a document of the three musicians' own experiences, injected with a natural urgency that comes from both the reality in the songs and writing and recording them in a studio paid for by the hour. For its listeners, it acts less as a roadmap through the turbulence and more as a confidante to share the highs and lows, drama and desire with, encompassing everything from sex, friendship and figuring out exactly who you are.

Arre! Arre! is the Swedish punk band that during the last decade have won multiple awards, been booked to festivals such as Roskilde & Sxsw and have gotten hand-picked to open for hardcore legends Refused. On their new LP, the band have maintained their core inspiration from the 90s Riot Grrrl scene, while at the same time broadening their sound to include a wider range of influences - from post-punk and 60’s ballads, to James Brown, to the Spice Girls.

As usual, the album has a strong underlying theme throughout - this time of motorbikes and female biker gangs, with the band even going to the extreme of recording local bikers driving around the car park of the Studio Sickan to sample within the tracks. Combined with the other new production quirks such as ABBA-inspired choirs and galloping percussion, “We Ride The Universe” has turned into a markedly cohesive and unique album for the band, sure to impress fans both new and old. The album is out on Pnkslm Recordings (ShitKid, Les Big Byrd etc.).

7ebra is the project of 25-year-old twin sisters Inez and Ella from Malmö, who grew up playing music together. Inez plays electric guitar and sings, Ella plays a keyboard, organ and Mellotron - whilst manually playing drum samples with her feet - as they both sing haunting harmonies in a way that only twins can. Beautiful but punk, minimalist but epic. The duo are making big waves already, having toured with Future Islands and The Dandy Warhols as well as slots at festivals such as Sxsw, Eurosonic and The Great Escape. On the debut album Bird Hour, they effortlessly combine their own brand of minimalist indie rock hooks with the unique production stylings of Tore Johansson, known for his work on Franz Ferdinand’s debut album and The Cardigans. The album is out via Pnkslm Recordings (ShitKid, Les Big Byrd etc.) and the band will tour extensively during 2023.

ShitKid’s lo-fi indie/punk rock debut LP “Fish” polarised music fans across the world. Most the reviews came in either 5/5 or 1/5, which is just the way we like it. A thrilling start of a great career that included shows all over the world and making Iggy Pop a fan. This repress contains two bonus tracks and is a part of the Pnkslm 10 year anniversary repress series featuring represses of some of the Swedish label's sold out key releases.

The solo project of Malmö songwriter Katja Nielsen, of acclaimed punk combo Arre! Arre!, is finally ready to unleash her debut LP 'Violent Tendencies', a ten-track deep dive into the stories of female murderers. Expertly produced, Violent Tendencies, takes its cues from '60s garage rock and girl groups rather than the eighties infused goth pop of her early EP's, looking outward rather than inward for a rollercoaster that veers between a glut of different genres, themes and lyrical ideas, although still scored through with Nielsen's sharp ear for melody.

Tom Serner had always intended to make a debut solo album in 2020. He couldn’t have known, though, how the unique nature of the year would shape it. By the time the world began to grind to a halt in March, Serner found himself, like a lot of us, with plenty of time on his hands. “It gave me the opportunity to go deeper into a kind of research process.”

He’d always known that he wanted this first album under his Sindy moniker to be a love letter to the nineties influences he grew up with, continuing in the vein of Hits for Kids, last year’s thrilling five-track EP. Now, he had the opportunity to take deep dives in the catalogues of cornerstones of the decade’s alt-rock pantheon, starting first with Radiohead, charting their progression from post-grunge to experimental electronica. With that foundation laid, he turned to shoegaze, ob-sessing over My Bloody Valentine: “I was inspired by the textural approach to music over melo-dy, even though MBV have both - Bilinda Butcher’s soft, ethereal vocals and Kevin’s weirdo gui-tar tunings.” As the process wore on, he explored the more eclectic side of the Sonic Youth oeu-vre, reappraised Sebadoh’s legendary III, and found a kindred spirit in Daniel Johnston, who’s lyricism chimed with Serner’s desire to imbue his music with a naiveté brought on by freedom of thought.

The fruits of this musical odyssey are in the nine tracks of Horror Head, which plays like a paean to the stranger side of nineties alternative. Written at home in Stockholm and recorded in con-junction with co-producer Jacob Haage at Studio Ging Ging, the album is a technicolor realisation of Serner’s vision; it filters his influences through a dream pop lens, recasting a decade’s worth of indie rock in the mould of Cocteau Twins. Stylistically, it twists and turns through a slalom of fresh ideas, from the airy prettiness of ‘Big Scare’ to the driving noise pop of ‘Phantom Limb’. At the centre of it all are Serner’s breathy vocals - think an off-kilter Elliott Smith, delivering what Serner himself describes as “seriously deranged four-chord songs”.

As is so often the case with a solo project, Sindy allows Serner to explore thematic ideas that the democratic nature of Ruby Empress wouldn’t allow him to. “A lot of the tracks are just about try-ing to find a place in this confusing existence,” he explains. “They’re attempts to put these really big abstract ideas into the short-form of a song.” He reckons with his past on the record - sizing up where he is now, relative to where he’s been - and some songs hint at a higher drama that the music’s breezy feel belies, such as betrayal. Writing in his second language, though, allowed him to take novel approaches; some of the album’s lines are plucked directly from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after he binge-watched four seasons during the writing process.

What might seem like a mischievous nod to a favourite TV show actually holds deeper meaning; the show’s blackly comic outlook on death is something that strikes a chord with him. That helps explain where the record’s title came from; Horror Head is an album defined by its dichotomies, between the musical present and past, and between alternately sunny and gloomy outlooks. “I totally understand that thing of finding the beauty in horror,” he reflects. “That’s where I get a lot of my creative energy - somewhere in between the soft and the hard, the dark and the light, the difficult and the easy. The sound that comes out of that is usually melancholy. It’s very therapeu-tic.”

The British-Brazilian duo Cherry Pickles return with their second full-length The Juice That's Worth The Squeeze, out October 23 on the Swedish indie label Pnkslm Recordings (ShitKid, Hollow Ship, Chemtrails etc). Following on from last year's break-through debut album, the Birmingham based duo quickly set to work on the follow-up, offering up another set of disjointed and delicious tracks that ranges from noisy garage rock in the vein of the Oblivians to something more akin to the much-missed surfy indie rock of Girls.

These two vicious bastards (Black Mekon and his brother Black Mekon) were named after the legendary Black Mekong, illegitimate children of prostitutes visited by missionary preachers, abandoned to fend for themselves on the banks of The Mekong River. Their mobile church of jet-engine noise and pelvis-shattering drums has graced shores all over Europe, Japan, South America and the USA both headlining and at the personal request of Jon Spencer, Guitar Wolf, The Scientists, Kid Congo, King Brothers and more.

Over almost 15 years Black Mekon and his brother Black Mekon have put together a healthy back catalogue and while their most recent recordings have included their friends and family joining them, their latest effort THE Lumpiness OF Demand is a quick detour right back the start, recorded fast and live as a two-piece with all the consideration and skill of a flaming, wingless jet engine heading for the mountain.