With the creativity licks of SMIRK and snottiness of ZHOOP, this split tape has the best of both worlds. Two solo projects on one tape!


Our take: Loopy Scoop Tapes brings us a well-matched split cassette featuring three songs each from these two punk rock solo projects. Smirk you’ll remember from their debut LP on Feel It Records and their recent EP on Total Punk / Iron Lung, both of which got a lot of play around Sorry State. Their three tracks aren’t as poppy as some of my favorite songs on the EP, showcasing the more punk rock side of the band. No complaints about that! While Smirk is a solo project (at least on their recordings), their songs have the dynamism of a full band, with a lot of interesting push and pull between the songs’ rhythms and the vocal and lead guitar melodies. It’s a cut above your typical egg punk-y solo project, and even these three raw tracks have that certain something special about them. As for Zhoop, we’ve carried a ton of this prolific band’s releases, but I haven’t dug into them yet… they have so many limited cassette releases I didn’t know where to start. Perhaps it’s because I’m hearing them next to Smirk’s more measured and composed songs, but Zhoop here sounds to me like a snotty, catchy hardcore band in the vein of Boogada Boogada Boogada-era Screeching Weasel, but filtered through the sound of contemporary post-Coneheads punk. Each of their three tracks gets faster and tougher-sounding than the previous one, with the opener “Fighting for Control” running at a similar clip to Smirk’s tracks, “I Don’t Care” getting angrier, and then “Breathe” erupting to a full-on hardcore sprint.