Classic-sounding New York City Punk Rock quartet The Underbites explode back on the scene with “Good Girl“, now available on Spotify and all major music services, with a killer companion video on YouTube.
“Good Girl” is a feel good, hyped up, can’t miss track for fans of acts like The Muffs, U.S. Bombs, The Ramones, Social Distortion and other pioneers of punk, with added homage paid to the proliferation of melodies and hooks in the pop-punk ’90s and early 2000s. The Underbites can vibe with any of the classic CBGB, SoCal, NYHC or Warped Tour scenes that were all highly distinct from one another, but were delivered with a distinctively punk rock ethos.
“‘Good Girl’ isn’t intended to be smarmy,” explains frontman/guitarist Jon Fox. “I saw the soul singer Simi Stone live and when I saw her play her song ‘Good Girl,’ I thought ‘How interesting would it be to write a song from the point of view of the character — from someone who turned good… but not that good.'” Delivered with the band’s trademark combination of humor and punch, the titular character gives up “everything except weed and sex.”
credit: Kirsten Blackburn
Lyrically, Fox draws as much from The Beach Boys, Squeeze and Robyn Hitchcock as he does from the Sex Pistols. Whether tackling activist posturing, consumer culture, economic decline, racial division, the sleazy machinations of politics, or polarizing figures like Donald Trump and Michael Moore, Fox is masterful at jolting listeners with an initial shock that, on closer inspection, reveals layers of thought.
Underbites songs, in fact don’t spoon-feed you what they’re trying to say, which leaves fertile ground for listeners to walk away with some much-needed new perspective. In a world that’s constantly shouting at us, Fox knows all too well that shouting by itself doesn’t do the trick. Sure, he shouts a good deal too, but his songs are spiked with nuggets of wit and intelligence that belie their surface presentation.
“There’s also,” Fox points out, “a lot of humor, which is such an important part of the palette. You never wanna beat people over the head, so I try to couch my opinions in storytelling—and vice-versa. When we do politics, it’s political with a small-p.”
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