Before David Barbe stepped back from the mic to join Malcolm Travis and Bob Mould in Sugar—one of the most brilliant, if short-lived, melodic alt-rock bands of the ’90s—he was the frontman for Mercyland.
The Athens, GA post-punk band of the ’80s, raised on records by Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, The Replacements, and Dinosaur Jr., added to the disparate sound of once sleepy Athens alongside The B-52s, R.E.M., and Pylon. For decades, outside of their one proper album (1989’s No Feet on the Cowling) and an album of unreleased music (We Never Lost a Single Game), put out years after the band’s breakup, the earliest Mercyland songs were only available via hard-to-find seven-inches on eBay and Discogs or grainy live clips on YouTube. Now, Propeller Sound Recordings are issuing a collection of the band’s unreleased archive of songs recorded from 1985 to 1987.
Produced by Barbe, this set includes 11 tracks. And coincidentally (or maybe not), it arrives just as Sugar has released their first new song in three decades and announced shows in New York and London next year.
While Sugar leaned toward power and jangle pop filtered through a heavy layer of distortion, Mercyland were rawer, owing more to traditional punk rock. Songs like “Amerigod”—opening, appropriately, on a squeal of feedback—and the blistering “Fall of the City,” with its machine-gun drumming and jagged distorted chords, brilliantly capture what it felt like to be a pissed-off kid in the mid-to-late ’80s. Despite its goofy title, “Vomit Clown” is a piece of DIY brilliance, sounding like a mash-up of The Blasters and The Ramones, wrapped up in a tidy two-minute burst.
There is an urgency and messiness to these songs here that make this release a compelling document of post-punk in the 1980s—long before bands playing this kind of music could ever imagine landing on the cover of a national music magazine, let alone on a non-college radio station. But songs like “Ciderhead” and “Western Guns” sound just as relevant in 2025 as they did in the late 1980s.
Along with Barbe, the songs in this collection were the work of original guitarist Mark Craig and drummer Harry Joiner. After Mercyland, Barbe joined the newly reformed Sugar, opened his own studio, went on to produce nearly every Drive-By Truckers album, and now directs the Music Business Program at the University of Georgia.
