Penny & the Pits - Liquid Compactor
Forward Music Group
Released on June 27th, 2025
Liquid Compactor’s opening track, “Montenegro On Ice”, is sneaky. It starts off with a guitar, all on its lonesome, sporadically firing into the void like radio waves from another planet, and then BAM the rest of the band comes in and it turns out the fucking guitar wasn’t even on beat one, man! It feels like you’re running a foot race in elementary school and your friend is doing anything they can to confuse the start. Imagine, in the most nasal voice possible, 10-year-old Timmy, wearing a baseball cap that’s facing any direction but forwards,“3, 2, 10, 6, 4, 1, SNOW!”. He laughs. What a dick. Eventually, Timmy gets to “...1, go!” and when he finally does, you trip over yourself, as you were too busy trying to figure out when you should start running to notice that your friend next to you had untied your shoes.
What I’m describing sounds like an unpleasant experience, but it’s not; it’s unexpected! And though you fall, you dust yourself off and start running. You’re 10! Every day is an adventure!
Ahem.
Though the song’s start throws listeners delightfully off balance, the chorus steadies the ship, giving us sailors a chance to regain their footing. The melody bobs and weaves steadily through the waves of noizze generated by the Pits, with an almost circuslike melody ducking through the tides, Stevens’ ghostly voice hovering over spacious yet hard driving punk numbers.
Liquid Compactor is the work of New Brunswick songwriter Penelope Stevens, and features a myriad of contributions from her friends and other bands (though the touring band has been Stevens, joined by Meg Yoshida, Colleen Coco Collins, and Grace Stratton [the Pits]). The first two tracks of the album feature contributions from Adam Sipkema and Brydon Crain, who along with Stevens, make up the art punk trio, Motherhood.
While every track on Liquid Compactor is a joy, the one I’ve had on repeat is “Sweat”. In my mind, it best displays the stern control that Stevens, and indeed her Pits, have over the variety and fluidity within their music. From its opening moments “Sweat” is playfully bucking punk tradition, with a count of just “One, two, three!” that launches the listener straight into a spiky wall of guitars, bass, and drums. After the dust has settled, the song slides into an eerily calm verse that highlights Stevens’ lyricism and vocal delivery. “You kiss your mother with that mouth? / So much shit to talk, you ever going to run out? / No, I don’t know that word / Not my vernacular / Please explain yourself” like OOOH BOY it feels like you’re watching Stevens’, stone-faced, destroy some drunk asshole’s ego with the amount of effort it takes to crush a fly, her voice tearing through distorted guitars and fuzzed out bass to deliver a gleefully disorienting mess of punk rock rage.“Sweat” shapeshifts one final time to resemble more of a classic punk or rock feel, taking pleasure in being slow and brutish, like a pig bathing in mud. After these many transformations, “Sweat” ramps up to deliver one final chorus, travelling through what feels like eons of punk music in just over three minutes.
Stevens’ vocal delivery transitions naturally from soft and biting to a piercing howl in the blink of an eye. The arrangements change from eerie and spacey to firm and spikey in a heart beat. And, somehow, despite the variety and undeniably dynamic nature of these songs, Penny & the Pits make it all sound totally natural.
Penny & the Pits are weird punk gods and I strongly recommend you take a listen to their debut album, Liquid Compactor.
