Saturday Night Sweetheart [LP]

More street-grit than surfside, Thee Tsunamis are a rock'n'roll joyride with Tura Satana at the wheel. On their debut full-length Saturday Night Sweetheart, the trio (Betsy on guitar, Jenna on bass, and Sharlene on beats) blend girl-group bubblegum with feral punk, hugging every hairpin turn of Kim Fowley's twisted, trashbucket heart along the way. With jagged harmonies over fuzz-crusted pop hooks, theirs is the sound of Brill Building teen-sploitation with bloodier results. From heart-in-a-blender tales to drag-race party anthems, these 12 tracks are as catchy as they are cutting and together they tell a story as old as time: what the men don't know, the little girls understand. Like Thee Tsunamis' tape A Goodbad Man Is Hard To Find (2013) and horror-concept EP Delirium and Dark Waters (2014), Saturday Night Sweetheart (May, 2015) was recorded to tape in the basement studio of Magnetic South and has all the signature fidelity of a subterranean rock'n'roll echo-chamber.