The title of this post tells it all. But some of the bands on “The Bad Penny’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2025” might surprise you.
1. The 20 Best Scandinavian Melodic Death Metal Bands of All Time
3. Friends of The Bad Penny Share Their Top 10 Lists of 2025 Best Albums
5. Pet Sounds #76: Cat Lovers Psychic Pigs Named Their Band as a Derogatory Slur Jabbing the Police
Continue reading
The numbers are in, and boy are … the numbers in.
What the ranking of The Bad Penny‘s most popular posts of 2025 indicates about this website can be interpreted in any number of ways. Would you like us to prattle on and on with theories and statistical data backing the sharp uptick? Yeah, we didn’t think so.
Instead, let’s cut straight to the (Chevy) Chase. Ergo, we bring you the rundown of The Bad Penny‘s most popular posts of 2025:
Continue reading
“Some who voted for [Trump] are not necessarily bad or gullible people. If that’s the case, they should very well now regret their decision and do what they can to right the wrong. They helped put the fox in the henhouse and should help to get rid of it.”
–Brett Bradford
—
Recently, yours truly had the distinct honor of conducting an extraordinarily in-depth and all-encompassing interview with one of the most crucial figures in ’80s underground music and foundational guitarists in noise rock: Brett Bradford, formerly of Scratch Acid and now a member of indie-rock quartet Suckling.
The extensive feature will appear on Post-Trash on October 7, but in the meantime, we’re bringing you, separately, his thoughts on Authoritarian America as part of The Bad Penny‘s increasingly critical series called On Tyranny. Here is that portion of the interview, followed by some additional thoughts that Bradford later shared.
Continue reading
As our nation rapidly transforms into Authoritarian America, artists – who are typically among the first to be targeted when a dictatorship takes control of a country – are relocating to countries where their right to free speech is still protected.
One of the more prominent indie-rock artists to make the move is Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow, who relocated to Portugal earlier this year, according to multiple sources who recently confirmed the news to The Bad Penny. None of the sources said outright that Trump’s reclaiming of the presidency was their motivating factor for Yow fleeing the U.S., however.
When yours truly interviewed Yow and Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison last year for a feature on FLOOD, the vocalist whose lyrics were historically apolitical admitted that he felt boxed in by the inexorable partisan strife in America and said he was compelled to address current events on the band’s comeback record, Rack.
“A larger percentage of the lyrics than I wished were based on the political climate in the U.S. for the last seven or eight years,” he confided in a video conference call.
Continue reading
(Note: The number of releases and duration of time spent by the bands on the label factored into this ranking. Nor did it take into account bands that issued records through Touch and Go‘s sister label, Quarterstick Records.)
1. Shellac
2. The Jesus Lizard
3. Big Black
4. Slint
5. Scratch Acid
6. Die Kreuzen
7. Don Caballero
8. Girls Against Boys
9. The Black Heart Procession
10. The Delta 72
11. Killdozer
12. Blonde Redhead
13. Didjits
14. Quasi
15. The New Year
16. Silkworm
17. Man or Astro-man?
18. Laughing Hyenas
19. Brick Layer Cake
20. CocoRosie
(PS: Fuck Butthole Surfers)
If you’re even fairly familiar with raunchy comedy, “The Aristocrats,” an ever-evolving running joke so dirty that comics used to only tell it to each other behind closed doors, probably rings a bell. The jape varies in length, vulgarity, structure, plot and tone, depending on whichever comedian is telling their version of it. But baked into the joke are, unwaveringly, graphic scenes of a family engaging in scatological, sordid and smutty behavior during an audition in a misguided effort to win over an agent to book their stage act. And the punch line always remains the same, with the family revealing at the end of the audition that their stage name is “The Aristocrats.”
Continue reading
Because I said so. Order never subject to change.
1. “Gladiator”
2. “Destroy Before Reading”
3. “Monkey Trick”
4. “Boilermaker”
5. “Dancing Naked Ladies”
Continue readingAfter one of the worst weeks in American history, The Bad Penny just learned a smidgen of good news that may boost your spirits as much as it did ours: Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow, who resides in one the areas hardest-hit by the Southern California fires, did not lose his home.
Someone make this guy a boilermaker.
Hate to say we told you so, but a few years after an anonymous leaker from the Biden Crime Family provided Extra-Super-Top-Secret Classified Files to The Bad Penny, we can now officially confirm that the Deep State Documents are completely True and prove that two famous rock musicians (Hollywood Elites, of course) are indeed among the 47 million Lizard People living among us in the United States (which is a “garbage bin,” by the way). We call it “The Maynard/Yow Connection.”
Continue reading
It was a privilege to be able to write a lengthy feature for FLOOD on The Jesus Lizard, one of my top three favorite bands of all time, and for vocalist David Yow and guitarist Duane Denison to speak extensively with me about their reunion(s), wild moments from yesteryear and their new album, Rack. Due to space constraints, FLOOD published an abridged version of the feature that ran roughly 2,000 words. Because The Bad Penny isn’t bound by such limitations, we’re bringing you the “extended and unreleased” version, which runs almost 900 words longer. Enjoy.
Continue reading
The Bad Penny (beta) 