It was a good time ago that the “Guardian” wrote a single sentence on Panic Shack in an article about a festival. This sentence in which the terms “La-Style Punk”, the go-go’s and Iron Maiden occur, had followed. He led Panic Shack onto the stage from Glastonbury, to Austin to the SXSW and on rather every hotlist and promising newcomer combination-and has been buzzing through the Internet for three years. “We get hyped all of the time”, the women’s choir now sings in the programmatic albumopener “Girl Band Starter Pack”, and that means that it is more of your own excitement, but can also be read as a swipe on the hysterical UK pop business.
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With his debut album, the band founded in Cardiff in 2018 finally solves this promise, but then not really. But the four women and the one man on drums fulfill different, not much less promising: Panic Shack does not sound like a classic Maiden metal, but-be honest-much better, namely much better, like the illegitimate lovechild of The Fall and B-52’s-and not because the band name is warned on their big hit “Love Shack”. No: just imagine that the Sleaford Mods have put on Beehive wigs, heard too much sixties-soul and beach boys and the cramps-and would also understand fun.
No job, no consumption, no problem
Is that great? Yes, that’s very great! Because the truth lies almost exactly between the ecstatic choirs and the Nöligen speech with which Sarah Harvey presents her texts. The ceilings classic British Kitchen-Sink issues, albeit from a decidedly feminist perspective: their origin from the working class, the influence of the rainbow press on body images, sexual harassment and the intolerable and genuinable and genuinable fact that too few pockets are always sewn in women’s clothes (“pockets”). But it is not just complained: Self-confident film heroin (“Thelma and Louise”) or the fouls (“Lazy”) are celebrated.
Is that political? But of course. “Lazy”, the irresistible high song on procrastination and unlature, of course also has a socio -political dimension, which is not to be sealed at all for the piece. No job, no consumption, no problem: you don’t have to be able to afford refusal, it is radical, it has explosive power – if it is not as hedonistic as Morrissey’s “Spent the Day in Bed” and also not as head of the “surrender” that Tocotronic once postulated.
The fact that Panic Shack came together in the good old punk spirit seven years ago, after the too much craftsmanship is rather fatal for creativity, you heard her first singles and the EP “Baby Shack” (2022). Now the rhythm is to the point, the noise attacks are probably dosed, the breaks are sitting in the right place, but punk is still. And now everyone, very loudly until capitalism gives up its mind: “I’m lazy and i like it.”
This review was first published in the MusikExpress 08/2025.