CRAMPS, HIVES & OTHER AILMENTS - Running music.

What came first: the egg punk revival or my inability to process emotions without categorizing them into subgenres? This is the question I'm asking myself at mile two of a Saturday morning run, wind off the lake, forty-three degrees, listening to something called "egg punk" which is apparently what we're calling lo-fi garage punk recorded in bedrooms now. The Hives. Spiritual Cramp. Teen Mortgage. Twenty tracks of frantic, twitchy, deliberately messy rock that sounds like The Cramps and The Wipers had a basement show baby in 2023.

Let me tell you about egg punk. It's garage rock filtered through hardcore energy, recorded on four-tracks, deliberately lo-fi, aggressively weird. It's what you get when kids who grew up on Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall decide punk needs to sound dangerous again instead of nostalgic. Spiritual Cramp out of Los Angeles, Teen Mortgage from wherever kids make noise rock now, and obviously The Hives anchoring this thing because apparently we need one band you've actually heard of to legitimize twenty tracks of beautiful chaos.

"Dog In A Cage" opens this and immediately I'm sprinting. Not because I planned to sprint—I'm a weekend warrior, I run ten miles a week to convince myself I'm still young—but because this music doesn't believe in warm-ups. Rigor mortis radio. Falling down. These aren't metaphors, they're physical threats. By "Space Jam" I'm remembering why I stopped going to basement shows: too much energy, not enough space, someone always bleeding by the end of the night.

Here's what I'm realizing around "Rattlesnakes In The City": this playlist is organized like a good punk show. No dynamic range, no ebbs and flows, just sustained chaos for fifty-some minutes. It's the opposite of how you're supposed to structure a running playlist—build, peak, recover, finish strong. This thing just screams from the first track and doesn't stop. It's exhausting. It's perfect.

Top 5 Reasons Egg Punk Is Actually The Perfect Running Music (Even Though It Makes No Sense):

1. **No time to think.** Every track is two minutes of frantic energy. Your brain can't spiral into existential dread when it's just trying to keep up with the tempo changes.

2. **Deliberately uncomfortable.** Running is uncomfortable. This music doesn't pretend otherwise. It's honest about being abrasive.

3. **No nostalgia.** Unlike most garage rock revivals, egg punk isn't worshiping the past—it's ransacking it for parts. Feels more authentic than another band trying to sound like The Stooges.

4. **The recording quality matches how you feel at mile eight.** Everything's a little blown out, a little distorted, barely holding together. That's what my cardiovascular system sounds like right now.

5. **It rejects optimization.** This isn't music designed to help you PR. It's music that exists because it has to exist. Running to it feels defiant instead of productive.

Barry would argue this isn't a running playlist at all, it's just a punk compilation someone slapped "running music" on because they needed a theme. He'd be wrong, but he'd argue it loudly. Dick would quietly mention that The Hives are Swedish garage rock revivalists from 1993, not actually egg punk, and technically this is genre chaos. He'd be right, but that's not the point.

The point arrives at track fourteen, "Eyes," which I'm pretty sure is by Spiritual Cramp but honestly at this pace everything blurs together and that's the appeal. I'm not analyzing. I'm not categorizing. I'm just moving. The first time in weeks my brain has shut up long enough to let my body do something without commentary.

"Good Samaritan" closes this thing and I'm done. Not done-done, like ready to collapse, but done in the way that a good album side ends and you just sit there for a second before flipping the record. Which nobody does anymore because vinyl is a hobby not a format, but you know what I mean.

What came first: the need to run away from your thoughts or the discovery that the only music that actually works is music too chaotic to think through? Did I pick this playlist because I needed something abrasive enough to match my mood, or did the music create the mood that justified the run?

It's not what you're like, it's what you like. I like music that sounds like it's barely in control. I like running that feels more like controlled falling than athletic achievement. I like that this playlist doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: twenty tracks of beautiful, stupid, life-affirming noise.

(Still googling what "egg punk" actually means. Still running anyway.)

Rob Gordon (Weekend Warrior)