Punk and hardcore are, at their best, forms of folk music. They exist outside the castrating purview of the mainstream music marketplace and feel no pressure to “innovate.” (The necessity of “novelty” in art is one of the greatest lies perpetuated by capitalism.) A good deal of the success of both genres is tied to how people react to it in a live setting, which has always been the fundamental context for folk music. This is music that brings people together; its canon is a shared language for millions around the world.

The development of no wave music was a decidedly avant-garde (innovation!) and experimental turn away from this egalitarianism, but in the years since its genesis within the late 1970s downtown New York art and music community, it too has become codified, turning from a no-rules mentality into a genre with immediately recognizable tropes—ones that have remained unchanged since probably the mid-1990s, when its first revival happened. I’m not sure I can call it a folk music, but it does exist outside the mainstream and thereby does not feel the pressure to “innovate.” (I use scare quotes because of the term's typically positive connotation in Western culture.)

Muscle Beach is a new band whose eponymous first record on PPM is a love letter to no wave, using standard rock instrumentation and art brut tropes to craft a shining example of the genre. I even hear strong callbacks to drummer Neil Young’s (yes, that’s his real name) old band, the Western Mass avant-rock legends Fat Worm of Error. If the record doesn’t break the mold, that’s because folk music—no matter if it’s electric or atonal—exists for all time and doesn’t need to play to the flavor-of-the-month mentality that drives contemporary musical discourse.