The Good, The Bad and The Zugly – punk from the fjords

The Good, The Bad and The Zugly find the algorithm to mix hardcore and blues

Just in time, before this shitty and crappy year’s end, I’m really glad to review one of the few good things that happened in 2020. The Good, The Bad and The Zugly are a five-piece band from Norway, and after their absolutely great last album called Misanthropical House that came out in 2018 they have released one of the records of the year, in my humble opinion. In ‘Algorithm and Blues’, their fourth studio album, these northlands guys have definitely sharpened their blades to the max, reaching for a powerful, snotty and poliedric sound.

Their sound has deep roots in the fast and aggressive tradition of hardcore punk, but these guys have a total crush on a pure and relentless rock’n’roll sound. The usual fierceness and rage of hardcore stands above everything – as you can hear in kings of inconvenience and what you have done for me lately? – but The Good, The Bad and The Zugly have found a great way to balance it with more mid-tempos. These guys have brilliantly done their fuckin’ homework, adding the traditional hardcore punk dough with some riff-blasting rock’n’roll, something between New York Dolls, AC/DC, Alice Cooper, the almighty Norway rock machine Turbonegro and all the best things that the scandirock sound has created.

This is just a mind blowing high octanes sound built on sharp riffs and angry and snotty vocals. Their caustic and abrasive attitude reflects on their lyrics, often and gladly tongue in cheek and ironic through nowadays way of living and society in general, with no mercy even for some people in the underground scene while not forgetting their love for drinking, partying and various excesses. By the way, they even found time to reiterate some well-known but never too much asserted concepts, like fuck the police.

A great and mature album, in the good and best meaning of the word ‘mature’, a complete record, where the sensations and atmospheres are perfectly balanced and sequenced, like in a well edited movie, different but constantly linked, even in their own diversity. As the really cool and epileptic artwork shows to us all, this record is son of these times, weird months and weird years, uncertain times filled by telematic frenetic irrationalism, innocent victim of a cursed year that made impossible for the band to promote and play this record as loud as possible on a sweaty and beer soaked stage. This is without any doubt one of the records of the year, for me. Turn the speakers insanely loud, listen to it and buy the fucking physical copy.
Rash

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