Suggestions
Suggestions
Oi! is punk kept loud, rough and as simple as it gets, closer to the early Sex Pistols and Clash than to hardcore’s extremes and made for a rowdy pub. Sham 69 had already taken street-level punk to prominence when, in 1980, Oi! became a movement in the pages of the music weekly Sounds, which defined it as working-class protest. By 1981 the National Front and the British Movement were recruiting skinheads, and skinheads were part of Oi!; on 3 July that year a Southall pub was set on fire with three Oi! bands inside. Many in Oi! fought the far right’s attempts to take over the music, but a few white-supremacist bands such as Skrewdriver left a stigma it never fully shed.
Cock Sparrer, active since 1972, added Simon Dobson’s strings to “Hand On Heart”, their last studio album. London’s The Chisel put Oi! hooks and hardcore punch on “What A F*cking Nightmare”, drawing on old-school hardcore and UK82. Toro Bravo and Socpro recorded “Mūsų Balsai” together: Toro Bravo are among Lithuania’s oldest active punk bands, and Socpro is a year old but made of scene veterans. Belarusian musicians started Warsaw-based Prorva in 2023 and write about exile, war and life under empires on “U cieni impieryj”, and Gothenburg’s City Saints split their double album “Punk & Roll” into an English-language LP and a Swedish-language one.