There's a show I saw at the Empty Bottle in 2003 that I still can't fully explain. Some touring egg punk band I'd never heard of—three pieces, all women, gear held together with duct tape and spite. They played for maybe twenty people. The guitarist's amp cut out twice. Nobody cared. The energy in that room felt like something about to snap, and when it finally did, it was glorious and messy and over in thirty minutes. I bought their seven-inch at the merch table. Lost it in a move. Never remembered their name.
This playlist has that same frequency. Thirteen tracks, forty-one minutes, all raw nerve endings and garage distortion. SunDog kicks it off with "Triple Dog," and immediately you're back in that basement show energy—the kind of punk that doesn't care if you're ready. Egg punk, garage rock, indie punk, riot grrrl—genres that shouldn't necessarily share the same playlist, but here they are, held together by the same thing that held together that Empty Bottle show: refusal to polish anything.
What makes egg punk work for running is the same thing that makes it work in a dive bar at 1 AM. It's lo-fi, it's bratty, it's deliberately ugly in all the right ways. The production sounds like it was recorded in a storage unit, and that's the point. When Forty Feet Tall hits with "Isochronism" and ISTA follows with "Megawatt," you're not getting stadium-ready hooks. You're getting three chords, maximum distortion, and the distinct impression that nobody involved wanted to make this easy on you. That's fuel.
The Pill's "Woman Driver" and Girl Tones' "Again" sit right in the middle, and this is where the riot grrrl lineage becomes obvious. Kathleen Hanna would recognize this energy—the refusal to make anger palatable, the way these tracks don't ask permission to be loud. Mary Shelley shows up multiple times on this tracklist, and "Goodnight, Goodbye" lands like the moment in the run where you stop negotiating with yourself. The tempo doesn't shift. Your resolve does.
What's different now is that I'm not in a basement watching three people destroy their gear for twenty strangers. I'm on the lakefront, overdressed for the first warm day, wind cutting off the lake, running to a playlist called MAD @ DAD and realizing that the anger I'm carrying isn't new. It's just louder. Or maybe the playlist is just willing to meet it where it lives.
Blood Lemon's "Burned" and Amyl and The Sniffers' "Hertz" close this out, and neither one offers resolution. That's the thing about this kind of music—it doesn't fix anything. It just makes space for the mess. I'm older now. I still don't know what I was running toward at that Empty Bottle show in 2003. I run anyway. The playlist ends. Nothing is settled. That's the point.
