With Bad Posture, Australian group Shady Nasty have produced an EP that feels like a bodily experience; one which strongly emphasises tone, power and rich production. Overdriven, half-distinguishable lyrics sail above bass which feels like it’s fracking brain juice from your skull. As a result, the (easy) comparison most will make is to New York punks Show Me the Body. But where SMTB’s lyrics border on the polemical, Shady Nasty’s pack a more confessional punch—and they prove that sometimes, by narrowing the scope, you can hit a target twice as hard.
There’s a natural desire to make reviews comprehensive, broad and detailed. But Shady Nasty nail the fundamentals so completely here, function so symbiotically, it barely needs to be said. Instead, I’ll waste even more words trying in vain to describe how gargantuan this EP’s sound is. Earlier this year, Abronia’s The Whole of Each Eye placed the deserts of desert rock—vacuums which demand legends—front-and-centre. Bad Posture feels like those same deserts, but crisped and shimmering in the haze of global warming; as hot as the hood of a car left sat in the sun. It’s that heaviness everyone is aiming for, the one you need to turn up and down in equal measure. If ears could squint, that’s what they’d be doing.
This is music which rejects genre labels, sprawled comfortably across multiple styles, for which “rap-rock”, “punk”, “post-hardcore” feel reductive—even insulting. Bad Posture is experiential, raw, technically faultless and impeccably recorded. As accessible as they are unfamiliar, Shady Nasty have established themselves as a band with hundreds of miles of road ahead of them.
Bad Posture will be released on Feb 21st. Listen to ‘Jewellery’ here.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe