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.
