By It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the Week, featuring the vintage hardcore stylings of Nashville punk band G.U.N. and their latest EP, DEATH DEALER.
G.U.N. – DEATH DEALER EP
Genre: Hardcore, Punk
Favorite Tracks: N/A
Nashville hardcore purveyors G.U.N. are here for a good time, not a long time. Their self-titled debut, a 10-song, 17-minute affair that ends as quickly as it begins, was a sludgy, gripping collection of dopamine-hitting punk songs. Released back in 2023, it’s been mostly radio silence since then outside of some local shows and festivals throughout the South and Midwest.
Their first new music since then, the DEATH DEALER EP, clocks in at under eight minutes, condensing vintage circle pit mayhem into an even more digestible form. The opening title track begins with the scuzzy, no-nonsense guitar tone somehow accordioning in and out and in of the production. The whole project, from the artwork to the gig flyers to the sound itself, has plenty of nostalgia for DC hardcore, with particular consideration for artists like Void or Government Issue—perhaps a natural place to turn to given both its historical significance and what Music City’s focus and sound was like during those bands’ heyday. (Try and do any research on Committee for Public Safety, often considered Nashville’s first hardcore band in the early ‘80s, it’s not an easy Google wormhole to find!)
Closer “Friday Night Stake Out” offers this compressed, padded sound to the percussion section at the open—its a thrillingly familiar and almost comforting recording style that makes the EP feel more like a long-lost artifact from the ‘80s than something recent. Yet it’s never a derivative seven-minute listen, just lived in. Start stretching and get your old-ass body ready for the pit over on Bandcamp.
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