BUZZCOCKS - Attitude Adjustments (2026)
I’ve never filed them under “records of the heart.” Not once. Their albums have always behaved like rain on a wax jacket: they slide off, no stains, no scars. Not even ghost marks. No visible traces, no invisible ones either. Just… nothing. This new record confirms both their coherence and my way of listening to them. Which is almost anthropological at this point. They’re excellent radio-interval music. The kind you hear while driving, half-distracted, and you suddenly think: wait — they’re still around? And they made something new in 2026?
Time folds like cheap plastic.
Of course, rhetoric demands respect. Anyone surviving forty years in punk deserves a small monument. Here we’re closer to fifty. That’s not a career, that’s geological time. Sedimentary rock. Archaeopunk.
But coherence with what, exactly? Coherence with who we used to be?
One of the most beautiful, rude, necessary lessons punk ever taught us is that neutrality is a myth. You pick a side or life picks it for you. So here’s mine, clean and unsentimental: this is an album we could have done without — at least according to how I feel punk.
And I don’t even mean the doctrinal version with safety pins and museum vitrines. I mean the joyful, careless, slightly stupid brilliance of ’80s punk rock — the kind that runs, falls, laughs, bleeds, keeps running. This record barely grazes that energy. It feels tidy. Professional. Sanded down.
Competent. Which is almost worse.
There’s nothing wrong here. That’s the problem.
No danger, no friction, no glorious mistake. Just songs that exist, do their job, and politely leave the room.
Still, this is only my listening — my asymmetrical ear. And Attitude Adjustments is only their album.
Both, I suspect, will leave the same footprint: none at all.
Like a cassette rewound too many times — the tape still moves, but the music has already evaporated.