Garage punk is a subgenre of rock
music. However, as with many terms applied to popular culture, the precise meaning can be hard to define. Garage punk is often used to refer to garage bands that are on small independent record labels or that aren't on labels at all (unsigned) and that happen to play some variety of Punk. In that sense, garage punk (and likewise, garage
rock) can be seen as a descendent of the Punk and New Wave movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as a counter-culture movement opposed to mainstream corporate
rock.
In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a new breed of revivalist Punk began to fester in the indie
rock underground that became known as “garage punk.” Garage punk is obviously closely related to garage rock revival, although most of these modern garage punk bands took their influences from some of the more hard-edged proto punk bands of the garage
rock genre, such as The Sonics, The Monks, The Stooges and MC5 through the early 1970s) as well as raw, simplistic "Killed By Death"-era proto punk and early New Wave, rather than by the British Invasion bands and their imitators. Some of the first garage punk bands to appear on the scene included The Gories, The Devil
Dogs, Supercharger, The Mummies, The Supersuckers, The Rip Offs, The Makers, Teengenerate, The Oblivians, and Poison 13. Attitude and primitive, lo-fi, budget
rock aesthetics were far more important to the development of garage punk than catchy melodies and
fancy ’60s-style clothes and vintage musical equipment, and the attitude was reflected in the sound of the
music: dirty, grimy, sleazy, sexy, menacing, and just flat-out
ugly. The garage punk movement is not as interested in copying the sounds and looks of the ’60s so much as just trying to
bash out some unpretentious, wild and wooly three-chord punk/
rock’n’roll. Some of these bands (
like The Mummies,
Phantom Surfers, Man or Astro-Man?, and The Bomboras) also experimented with instrumental surf
rock.
