Lektron - "Dirty Jacks"

If you're wondering what Matt Skiba has been up to since Tom DeLonge rejoined Blink-182, that answer is Lektron. The former member of Alkaline Trio has formed an all-star punk rock supergroup for his new band, which also features Atom Willard (Rocket from the Crypt, Against Me!) on drums, bassist Hunter Burgan (AFI), and lead guitarist Randy Moore (Spiritworld, Dan Andriano & The Bygones). The quartet's new single has the pop punk with an edge sound you'd expect from this collection of musicians, but there's also a mixture of garage rock and heavier mainstream alt-rock throughout. The guitars have just a little unexpected crunch to them, and the song isn't exactly catchy but will still find a way to burrow into your skull. "Dirty Jacks" is the kind of song that both is and isn't what you expect before you start listening.

You can listen to "Dirty Jacks" below. The single is available with the B-side "She's a War" via Asian Man Records, and both can be found through Bandcamp. For more on Lektron, check out the band on Instagram.

Ken's Best of 2020 - #8: Laura Jane Grace - Stay Alive

There have been roughly a million quarantine albums released this year, but the best has been from Laura Jane Grace. None of them truly capture the feeling of being trapped in our house for far longer than we could have imagined while the world seems to be burning all around us. Stay Alive is such a loaded album title right now, and obviously Laura Jane Grace chose it for that reason. The vast majority of the fourteen songs on this album are just Grace and her guitar ("Shelter in Place" and "SuperNatural Possession" includes a drum machine) which gives the entire album such an intimate, personal feeling. It's a collection of songs about quarantine and the hopeless despair so many of us are feeling right now. It's not all doom and gloom to listen. Somehow Grace takes these feelings and uses them to inject a feeling of hope and community into the songs on Stay Alive.

Songs of note: "The Calendar Song," "Hanging Tree," "SuperNatural Possession," "The Swimming Pool Song," "The Mountain Song"