We know D.C. Get our free newsletter to stay in the know.
For many teens who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, shopping malls weren’t just a mecca of commerce, they were a home away from home. A place to escape the angsty weirdness of teen life while loitering in the food court and browsing Suncoast. They were a place where entire social cliques aimlessly hung out. A place where identities were forged. [Editor’s note: A place like this?].
That’s gone now—thanks, in part, to having the world readily available to you at the mouse-click of a button—but nostalgia for such a bygone era exists in Homosuperior‘s The Mall Madness Demo, whose snotty take on garage-punk plays like a deranged, fuzzed out MC5 on speed. Through scuzzed-out guitar and bass riffs, singer Josh Vogelsong wails and moans—sometimes at breakneck speeds—about youth, queer identity, and, well, getting high.
The sentiments culminate in the sludgy ripper “Mall Madness,” in which Vogelsong just rattles off a bunch of ’90s mall tropes: “Suncoast Tapes/Arcade games/Waldenbooks/Circus mag/Mallcop drag/Mall goth fag/Compact discs/Teenage dicks/Sbarro slice.” Had Homosuperior been around 20 years ago, The Mall Madness Demo would’ve been the perfect tape to pop in your Sony Walkman while aimlessly wandering the food court.
Image via Homosuperior/Bandcamp