The cover photo says enough before you even press play—Zoe, mid-wedding, caught in a moment that wasn’t meant to last. Cash Bribe decided to keep it anyway.
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“White Wedding,” out April 3 via Futureless Records, is a small-run cassette—50 copies total, split between the band’s Bandcamp and Quiet Panic’s distro. It follows last year’s “Demonomics” EP, their second release with the imprint, but this one works more like a snapshot than a statement. Three live tracks and a demo, pulled from a stretch of shows and a stop at Cart Music in Philadelphia, where they recorded two songs during a tour run.
They didn’t go in planning to document new stuff. Kirk McGirk had that idea at first, but it didn’t stick. “We didn’t want to force anything,” he says. Instead, they turned back to something that already had a life—something tied to a specific night, a specific room, and people who’d been showing up for them long before any tape release.
That night was a wedding in Bushwick.
Zoe and Charlotte, both regulars at Mona’s—a small East Village dive bar where drummer Larry Koch is “there all the time”—asked the band to play. The connection runs deep enough that Larry jokes about being related to Charlotte through shared family ties in Edinburgh. The band showed up in tropical shirts and built a set around the idea that it didn’t have to make sense.
“We chose ‘White Wedding’ as a gag,” Larry says. “But after butchering it… it sounded like a good idea to play it at the wedding.”
The joke stuck. What started as a one-off turned into something they kept in their set, then something they wanted to document. The version here—tracked at Cart Music with engineer Mathias behind the desk—pushes Billy Idol’s original into their lane: faster, rougher, still recognizable if you know it well enough.
Brian Jackson puts it: “It’s in the general vicinity of punk rock but not too on the nose. Even though we wrecked it, it’s still identifiable.”
That push and pull is the whole point. McGirk describes it less like a tribute and more like taking something familiar and bending it until it fits. “We thought it was funny to take this grandiose 80’s song that everybody knows and cleave it into this thing. ‘Fuck you, this is whatever we want it to be.’”
Joey Dee came around to it for similar reasons. “It was a bit different from our normal sound, but not totally out of our wheelhouse.” After the wedding, it stopped feeling like a throwaway. They had a Cart session booked anyway, coming off a strong show at Cinco de Mayo in New Brunswick, and went straight in while everything still had momentum. “We were in fighting form,” he says. “Press record and lay it down.”
The session also gave them a chance to revisit “March of the Creeps,” a track that’s been around since their first EP, back when McGirk handled vocals. That early version was loose, barely held together.
It stayed in the set, though, and over time it tightened into something else entirely. “Now when we play it it’s a fucking steamroller,” McGirk says. “Way faster and meaner.” This recording locks in that shift, with Joey on vocals and his noise setup pushed forward.
There’s a thread running through all of it—versions changing depending on who’s holding the mic, how the band plays it that night, what room they’re in. McGirk points to Black Flag as a reference point, where songs like “Wasted” or “Jealous Again” existed in multiple forms depending on the era.
For Cash Bribe, the live set is where those changes actually happen. “We put a lot into our performances,” Joey says. “We’re able to feed off of each other’s energy really well.” The tape leans into that instead of smoothing it out. They play everything fast anyway, as Larry puts it, so capturing it live “gives it more urgency.”
The rest of the cassette follows that same logic—no polish pass to make it sit still. Just a document of how the band actually sounds when it counts.
“White Wedding” is available now via Cash Bribe’s Bandcamp and Quiet Panic’s store, with the cassette limited to 50 copies.
Cash Bribe will play Brooklyn on April 19 at The Spare Room at The Gutter, joining a four-band bill with Askeados, Bowhead, and Human Ecology Fund. The show is presented by OWL Presents, doors at 7:00 PM, and it runs as a 21+ event with valid ID required.
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