Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
Some songs get written in an afternoon. “Unwanted In July” started as a 24-hour songwriting contest entry back in 2024, built off the prompt “summer” — and instead of a beach anthem, Meteor Police wrote a rebuttal to every adult who ever wrote them off as just another suburban kid playing dress-up punk.
The Brick, New Jersey quartet closes out their new album, Death Is So Permanent — out now on Mint 400 Records — with the track, and today they’re dropping the video for it. “You’ve got to suffer to be punk rock” sits next to old grudges and a little self-mythologizing, all filtered through the particular nostalgia of growing up bored and pissed off in the suburbs. “‘Unwanted In July’ is meant to invoke the nostalgia of being a suburban punk kid on summer holiday and highlight both the good and bad elements from a troubled childhood,” the band says.
When they dug the track back out, most of the music survived untouched. The lyrics got a rewrite, and Joe Gullace came in on trumpet for a bridge that swerves hard into horn-driven, almost Spanish-punk territory before the main riff yanks it back.
Meteor Police is bassist Bill Pompeo, guitarist Dustin Schoonmaker, drummer Justin Wright, and vocalist Shawn Clancy. Collectively they point to Fugazi, Les Savy Fav, and Q and Not U. Individually it’s a mess in the best way — Deftones and Pantera next to The Blood Brothers, King Gizzard, and Thee Oh Sees. That range makes sense once you know where they’re from: Ocean County’s basement-and-VFW-hall circuit, a scene that still runs on fire stations and folding chairs. They’ve built an audience in Asbury Park without abandoning Brick.
Death Is So Permanent trims the runtime without dumbing anything down. Earlier records leaned on surf-rock detours and ran past the five-minute mark; this one moves faster while packing in more hooks and denser arrangements. The band hasn’t dropped its irony or its self-deprecation, but tracks like “Unwanted In July” and “Invalid Geography” let the guard down more than usual.
The album came together through a run of lineup changes, was recorded by Rudy Meier at Yung Bull Recording in Brick, and mastered by Pat Noon at Eight Sixteen Recording.
Watch the “Unwanted In July” video below, and find Death Is So Permanent wherever you stream.
