New Noise’s Bandcamp of the Day feature was created to highlight new and upcoming bands that our readers might not have heard of yet. We’ve seen some bands go from Bandcamp of the Day to the print magazine cover (Militarie Gun) in a little over a year. I’m proud to have featured some artists for their very first songs or their first EP or their first albums. I’m proud of the ones I see going on to do bigger and better things because I love to tell people I told you so.
Since I took over the Bandcamp of the Day last year, I’ve tried to do my best to highlight bands that we’ve heard about from a variety of methods, from the bands that email us to the smaller bands I happen to know of and try to keep a close eye on, to the occasional cold search through Bandcamp to look for some specific genre or other representation that I haven’t been able to put front and center for a while.
I try to keep up a variety of genres, and make a particular effort to highlight BIPOC artists, women, nonbinary artists, LGBTQ+ artists, artists local to me in Denver, international artists, anyone Lisa or Addison thinks are cool, and yes, occasionally, my friends; deal with it.
That being said, in 2023, there are a lot of ways that upcoming bands are discovered including SoundCloud and YouTube and, at this point, to privilege any one of these companies over any other seems silly. This doesn’t mean we won’t cover Bandcamp at times, but we also want to pull from any number of platforms to cover more bands. So it’s with pleasure we announce the launching of Today’s New Noise starting today. Obviously, nothing will change about my priorities to of what kinds of artists I want to feature. Today’s New Noise will hopefully see some of tomorrow’s greatest bands from pretty much every genre you can think of. Think of it as our New Year’s resolution to bring you more bands.
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For the very first edition of Today’s New Noise, I’m pleased to feature Cheap Perfume, a punk band out of Denver! They recently put out a new music video on YouTube of their 2021 single “No Men,” and they’re gearing up for one of their biggest shows ever as they’ll be the first band opening for the legendary Laura Jane Grace in Denver on New Year’s Eve. In fact, it’ll be their second consecutive year playing on NYE, as last year they opened for The Bouncing Souls’ New Year’s show.
“No Men” is probably the band’s most controversial song, but there’s no good reason it should be. The song is clearly a satire of what toxic men think feminism is, rather than a statement of the band’s actual beliefs. If that wasn’t clear enough from the lyrics of the song—and it became obvious from all the dude bros who flipped them off during this song at last year’s Bouncing Souls NYE show that it wasn’t clear enough to some people—the video and its accompanying description on YouTube makes that even clearer.
The song sees lead vocalist Stephanie Byrne and guitarist Jane No abusing men, primarily their bandmates, for no good reason. It’s a hilarious send-up of the anti-feminist crowd, and brings home the message of an amazing song. Check out the hilarious, low-budget video brilliantly directed by Meg Hartung, below:
If you’re going to be in the Denver area to ring in 2024, there’s still tickets left to see Cheap Perfume open up for Laura Jane Grace and Mya Byrne here, but hurry because they’re going fast. Follow Cheap Perfume on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
Photo courtesy of Cheap Perfume
