Texas is the proud home of failing power grids, an ever-expanding system of highways, and idiotic Republican politicians making sure every psycho with a gun has some extra ammunition. But hey, at least we have that beaver fuck from Buc-ees to soothe our sorrows with his Nug-ees.
While it may seem like everything in Texas sucks, it’s important to realize there are real people living here, and some of those people are cool as fuck and make good music. So, in light of that, here are some of the greatest bands that began their journey in the Lone Star state.
Butthole Surfers
We here at The Hard Times know our punk history, which would be incomplete without a mention of this classic band. Formed in San Antonio, the band quickly relocated to California after realizing Texans were completely fine with butt stuff, but hated the whole surfing part.
At the Drive-In
Perhaps the second-best thing to ever come out of El Paso after Eddie Guerrero, At The Drive-In’s “Relationship of Command” caught the attention of the music world. Many older punks still remember their breakup as the most devastating event that happened in 2001.
The Mars Volta
In the aftermath of ATDI, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala wanted to experiment with their sound further. While the Mars Volta focused on producing a more progressive sound, nothing would be as progressive as the time when Bixler-Zavala denounced his former Foss bandmate Beto O’Rourke for endorsing Biden in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Sparta
The other half of ATDI’s breakup, Sparta were known for their concrete post-hardcore roots and lead singer Jim Ward’s emotional delivery. Unfortunately, the band was hit hard by the release of Zach Snyder’s 300, as Leonidas’ iconic line fucked with the band’s SEO.
Power Trip
A list of the best bands from Texas that doesn’t include Power Trip is a list that should be vehemently ignored, or alternatively, brought to the town square and publicly ridiculed. The only thing left to say is Riley Gale Forever
Mineral
Originally from Houston, Mineral was one of the best emo bands to emerge in the ‘90s. Their most popular song, “Parking Lot” is rumored to be a scathing takedown of their hometown’s extreme dependence on cars. Either that or it’s about some sad shit that would get us depressed, and since we’d rather be mad than sad, we’re saying it’s the former.
Parquet Courts (kinda)
Okay sure, if you search up Parquet Courts on Google, it’ll say they’re a NY band. Look, we’re no geneticists, but if 3/4 of the band met in Denton, we’re pretty sure that means they’re a Texas band. And besides, New York already has so many great punk acts, so please just let us have this. We’ll even give you Owen Wilson’s younger brother, Luke, if that sweetens the deal.
MDC
In a state full of conservative freaks waiting for their chance to suck the dirt clean off a cop’s boots, MDC are a beacon of hope. It’s said that their song “John Wayne Was a Nazi” single-handedly raised the blood pressure of thousands of Ag teachers across the state.
The Riverboat Gamblers
Now this is a band that knows how to cater to their environment. While their name may lead you to believe they’re the rootinest tootinest four-piece bluegrass-country outfit from Chattanooga, they’re actually a killer punk band from Denton.
Portrayal of Guilt
Hailing from the self-proclaimed black sheep city of Texas, this Austin band has been making waves since 2017 with their blend of hardcore and screamo. It’s bands like this that remind us there’s more to Austin than out-of-state tech bros and college kids that just found out the Blur guy is also the Gorillaz guy.
Kublai Khan TX
Okay, this one might blow your mind. Who would’ve thought the TX at the end of their name meant they were from Texas? Certainly not us, we were too busy peeling the dried glue off our hands during our 2nd-grade social studies class. Regardless, this Sherman metalcore band will surely fit into any playlist meant to scare the living shit out of WASP moms.
The Impossibles
Originally from Austin, The Impossibles brought the undeniable swagger of ska to the uncultured masses living in suburban Texas. The introduction of ska to Texans created an imbalance in the world of high school football, as many players quit to pursue their true passion of doing a little jig while playing the trumpet.
Judiciary
Formed in 2014, this metalcore band from Lubbock quickly became the talk of the town. More specifically, it’s the devil’s talk, if you want to believe your super-religious aunt who somehow makes a decent living from selling Herbalife products and Mary Kay cosmetics.
Toadies
Although the Pacific Northwest was the birthplace and hot spot for grunge in the ‘90s, something cool happened in Fort Worth for the first (and last) time ever and Toadies were born. Do yourself a favor and listen to their debut before you go rummaging through your attic looking for your Mountain Dew-stained Guitar Hero II controller.
And there you have it. 14 of the best bands from Texas. Did we miss anyone? Yeah probably, we don’t give a shit. What’s important is that you listen to these bands and realize there are some good things that come from Texas. At the very least, you can appreciate that we didn’t give you the All-American Rejects, like those fucks in Oklahoma did.
The seven years between “Title Tk” and “Mountain Battles” were packed with cross-country recording sessions and a Pixies reunion tour. Like any good Breeders jaunt, “Mountain Battles” charges headfirst into new musical territory, with some inconsistent results. A handful of songs like “Night of Joy” and “We’re Gonna Rise” sound like great Radiohead album cuts, if that makes sense. The lowkey moments shine through, especially the chilled out “Regalame Esta Noche.” Ultimately, “weakest Breeders album” is still a compliment.
It’s funny to look back on 2018 and think “Ah, what a simpler time” because we had no idea the world was going to really go to shit. But 2018 gave us “All Nerve,” which isn’t phased by the ten-year gap in new music from the band. All of the tracks feel right at home within the Dealscography. “Spacewoman” is a great fucking song. There is a slight sense of “been there, done that” throughout, but there’s no hint of late-career desperation for the good ol’ days of “Last Splash.”
The Breeders come out swinging with “Pod,” an album with the confidence of a tall guy planting himself in the front row of a basement show. It’s an album full of messy, great ideas, which makes sense considering it was born out of Deal’s growing frustration with Pixies. “Pod” was a quick hit upon release and became favorite for many of the band’s contemporaries including some guy named Kurt Cobain.
Created in the midst of recording misfires and lineup changes, “Title TK” still manages to show off Deal’s songwriting bite. The songs skew moodier, with several tracks like “Off You” shifting to more subtle, spacey instrumentations. Grungey rockers like “Huffer” and “London” are still plentiful, leading to a refined and well-rounded mix of tracks. Also it came out a few months before 9/11, The Breeders really like to get their writing cycle done before world changing events.
The serene vibes of “Drivin’ on 9”. The spacey guitars and vocals on “No Aloha.” The mere existence of “Cannonball” and “Divine Hammer.” Every song on here is just unfair. In a shitty industry where rigid, design-by-committee songs and overpaid, under-talented shithead pop producers reign supreme, “Last Splash” proves there will always be a place for pure, honest creativity. And this was also the year Beanie Babies debuted, conspiracy theorists might start to worry that The Breeders are part of some shadow government hell-bent on chaos, but it’s probably just a coincidence.
After the critical and commercial failure of “Around the Sun,” R.E.M. was ready to go back to basics and just straight up rock it out. Unfortunately, that meant that the band was more concerned with attempting to capture the energy of their fiery early years than, y’know, writing good songs. At least the band sounds like they’re having fun with the generic guitar workouts on “Accelerate,” but they’re the only ones.
Ah, the album so bad that it inspired a worse one. “Around the Sun” is a surprisingly listenable album, but that’s the most backhanded of compliments for a group that helped define the very concept of alternative rock. More than anything else, “Around the Sun” is a fussy and directionless album, clearly the sign of a band that had never really regained its footing after unexpectedly becoming the biggest thing in rock for a hot minute. Also, Q-Tip dropping a guest verse on “The Outsiders” meant that Michael Stipe had to be the one to do it live, which is just kind of embarrassing.
It’s always a small miracle when a legendary, long-running band’s last album is not their weakest effort, so “Collapse into Now” has that going for it. After the dad-rock amp blasts of “Accelerate,” the album isn’t exactly a return to form, but it is noticeably a synthesis of many familiar R.E.M. elements, which is welcome enough. A little mandolin here, some classic Mike Mills backing vocals, some weird little flourishes like a sousaphone; that’s all they needed to retire with a little grace left in them.
By 2001, it must have been clear to R.E.M. that they were in imminent danger of becoming elder statesmen of rock, which is to say, a band that no one listens to anymore. That probably explains the clear sign of strain on “Reveal,” which isn’t so much bad as it is just somewhat uninspired. The catchy, wailing chorus of “Imitation of Life” would have been a sign of great things ahead for an up-and-coming band, but for R.E.M., it was a hint that the band’s power was waning.
Critics described “Monster” as either their grunge album or their stab at punk rock, which just goes to show that music journalism is pretty bad in any decade. R.E.M.’s ninth album is a classic example of a band deciding to respond to massive success by doing the direct opposite of what got them there. In this case, that meant Peter Buck ditched the mandolin and went hog-wild on the tremolo and fuzz, to immediately diminishing returns. Despite that, the album was R.E.M.’s absolute commercial apex, hitting number one on the U.S. Billboard chart and eventually going quadruple Platinum, which is interesting for an album that most people remember as a failure. Anyway, as a collection of songs, “Monster” starts out strong with “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and just gets steadily less interesting from there, until you suddenly come to and find yourself donating your copy to Goodwill.
Okay, things get more difficult from here, because R.E.M. had a run of classic albums in the 1980s and 1990s that are arguably the most consistent and interesting in rock history. Of those, “Fables of the Reconstruction” is the weakest, likely because the band decided to pull up the stakes and record a loose concept album about the American South in London. It’s an album for a band attempting to become something more than it is, but it’s just not there yet.
“New Adventures in Hi-Fi” is like surfacing for a huge breath of air after nearly drowning in the slog of distortion that was “Monster.” Largely regarded as R.E.M.’s last great album, this is the work of a band full in command of their powers of songwriting and performance, but also a little too scattered to stand along the unassailable greats. That makes sense, considering the album is essentially stitched together from fragments recorded during the “Monster” tour and expanded on. It lacks the cohesion and vision of their best work, but when you’ve got tracks like the River Phoenix dirge “E-Bow the Letter” and the ineffably romantic “Electrolite,” that can be excused. On the other hand, did you have to name a song fucking “Binky the Doormat?”
And so we’ve come to the “sellout” album, when R.E.M. made the jump from indie label I.R.S. to Warner Bros. On behalf of people in the future, we say “fuck you” to the college rock gatekeepers of the 1980s, because “Green” is a fascinating and uncompromising record for a band that just signed a huge deal with a major label, if still not quite as tight as it would soon be. This is the type of album when a band still feels quirky enough to end with a track titled “Untitled,” but also has the emerging pop instincts for bangers like “Orange Crush” and “Pop Song 89.” At this point, R.E.M. was now frequently mixing up the instrumentation from the classic guitar-bass-drums, which would pay far greater dividends soon.
Considering it’s the first album recorded after Bill Berry left the group after a series of strokes, “Up” is a shockingly strong album. If the remaining trio had dissolved, gone into hiatus, or put out some shitty retread album, no one would have blamed them. Instead, the new configuration of R.E.M. abruptly veered into a new, chillier sound dominated by keyboards and programmed drums, and astonishingly, it works. “Lotus” has some of Michael Stipe’s snottiest vocals over the time period over eerie guitars and a trip-hop beat, while “Daysleeper” stands as perhaps the most innocently beautiful ballad of their entire catalog. The band would not be able to maintain this momentum for long, but “Up” almost made it seem like they could.”
From the first moments of “Finest Worksong,” it is clear that R.E.M. was up to something new. The booming, martial drums of Bill Berry, Peter Buck’s jagged bricks of guitar lines, and Mike Mills’ deliberate, stately baseline perfectly frames Michael Stipe’s voice, which has fully abandoned the muttering tone he had been famous for, and is now strident and even angry. Part of this can be attributed to producer Scott Litt (who also worked with a few bands you might know of, like Nirvana and the Replacements) coming aboard and bringing a new, more professional polish to “Document.” It’s also where R.E.M.’s political leanings began to emerge, underlining the grim beauty of “Welcome to the Occupation” and the apocalyptic goof of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” This is the true beginning of R.E.M.’s Imperial phase, and it sounds like it.
“Lifes Rich Pageant” is everything R.E.M. wanted “Fables of the Reconstruction” to be, and wasn’t. With this album, the band fully fused the weirdness of their early albums with the ferocity they had been embracing. Songs like the kickoff “Begin the Begin” have a driving force that had only occasionally emerged in earlier albums, while “Fall On Me” hints at their growing handle on pop hooks. If “Life’s Rich Pageant” has a failing, it is that it does not have the kind of direct and clear smash hit that would buoy them to superstardom in just a few years. But it is also a massive leap forward for R.E.M. and a demonstration of a shocking new power in their music.
“Automatic for the People” is the most downbeat, elegiac album to ever become an era-defining hit, impacting the 1990s like few other albums not named “Nevermind” did. After years of developing a ferocious hard rock sound, R.E.M. made one of their trademark left-turns and produced a melancholy masterpiece.R.E.M. reportedly initially wanted to produce another fast-paced rock album, but songs like the sweetly gorgeous “Man on the Moon” were the closest they could get at the time. The album is dominated by ruminative flashes of memory like “Nightswimming” and the wistful instrumental “New Orleans Instrumental No. 1,” while even louder tracks like “Monty Got A Raw Deal” are built on a foundation of sorrow. Listening to “Automatic for the People” is the perfect thing to bum yourself out, but in a fun way.
In an age of Soundcloud rappers, it seems pretty funny that Michael Stipe was considered to be a mumbling, indecipherable singer. Still, there is something enigmatic about “Murmur,” the debut album that first established R.E.M. as one of the most fascinating bands of the 1980s. Equal parts confessional mysticism and jangly college rock, the album remains a highlight of the era, a singular collection of songs that seem to be faint echoes of 1960s pop being overshadowed by dark folk and strange turns of phrase like “Inside a moral kiosk.” No band could do better to throw the gauntlet down with a first album.
While there is no one definitive “R.E.M. sound,” you might not think of the band as upbeat, exactly. However, that’s how “Out of Time,” the band’s big breakthrough to the mainstream opens, with the strangely jocular “Radio Song,” where Michael Stipe finds himself unexpectedly backed up by the deep baritone of KRS-One. R.E.M. was ahead of the curve on a lot of things, but they are rarely given credit for crossing over hip hop and alternative rock before anyone but Run-DMC had even thought it possible. Of course, “Out of Time” is dominated by “Losing My Religion,” the archetypal, eternal R.E.M. song that will soundtrack the death of our sun millions of years from now. When a song is as fundamentally perfect and heart-wrenching as that, it is difficult for anything else to register. And yet, “Out of Time” contains country-inflected classics like “Near Wild Heaven” and the sublime instrumental “Endgame,” showing a band expanding in every direction possible. It’s no wonder this is what launched the band to global stardom.
Where “Murmur” luxuriated in an eerie, timeless atmosphere on each track, the follow-up album “Reckoning” is a blast of post-punk smashing up against a wall of jangly pop, a weird, wild collection of incredibly catchy songs that had no chance of ever becoming hits in their day. The album opens with “Harborcoat,” the best song that Wire never wrote. If all you knew of R.E.M. was the stately murk of their debut, you would be shocked but the jittery, muscular propulsion of it, the way Stipe and Mills’ voices wind around each other and the beat drives it all. Then it goes on to classics like the keening “So. Central Rain,” which matches Stipe’s plaintive lyrics against a surprisingly upbeat baseline, and the aching “Camera,” a truly heartbreaking paean to a lost friend. “Reckoning” is R.E.M. at their most youthfully eclectic, and they would never record anything as wildly scattered yet potent again.
If you want something sick that your tattoo artist has created or based on traditional old-school designs, you can always trust their flash sheet. If you want a design that you have come up with in your head, book a custom tattoo. Don’t pick the eagle off the wall and then ask to get rid of the knife in its mouth and fire coming off its back, those are the awesome parts.
Speaking of traditional flash, don’t be a poser. If you are going to get that swallow bird tattoo, you better have traveled 5,000 nautical miles. And if you are getting a teardrop under your eye, well I hope he had it coming to him.
Asking a tattoo artist to tattoo someone else’s design on you is the equivalent of tattoo cuckolding. Are you also going to go back to their house and fuck their significant other in front of them? If you have an artist you want to be tattooed by then pick one of their designs, it’s that simple.
We know tattoos hurt, but you don’t need to flop all over the place like a fish that just landed in a canoe. It might not be the most comfortable feeling getting your ribs tickled by a thousand tiny swords, but if you are determined to get that sick side splitter you need to be prepared to sit like a stone. Try not to laugh and keep breathing to a minimum if you can.
Nothing kills the vibe in a tattoo shop like a tag-along with bad opinions. If you want to bring a buddy along to your appointment, be sure they know how to keep their mouth shut. Better again, bring someone who will hype up the design and buy beers for everyone in the shop.
You might think you’re more charming after you’ve had a few, but you’re actually even more annoying than normal. The benefit of you being drunk is that you might be willing to pay more, and you should. The downside is you’re going to do the drunk close talking that everyone hates, and you’re going to bleed more. Get tattooed sober you coward.
Tattoos hurt, and everyone needs a break from time to time. But starting and stopping every 5 minutes isn’t doing anyone any favors. Suck it up, sit there, and you will get a break eventually. This is a surefire way to end up getting a nice dry paper towel wipe as the tattoo winds down.
Why are you going to make someone stare at a photo of your ugly partner and pretend this is a good idea? Ask for a tattoo of your dog instead, people love dogs. Nobody loves the person you’ve been dating for 3 months.
Any phrase that requires a comma is a bad idea. Even if it is put in the right place, strangers will always stare at your tattoo to check if you have a big permanent grammatical fuck up on your arm to add a bit of smugness to their day. Don’t make your tattoo artist have to hire a copy editor for the day because you read Voltaire for the first time.
If you don’t want to pay the price for a good tattoo, find someone who will give you a shit tattoo for cheap. Just pay your artist the rate they gave you, don’t try to negotiate a deal. And be sure to leave a tip especially if they’re super nice or played a few sick Deftones tracks during your session.
