Petrol Girls | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- English/Austrian punks Petrol Girls are back with their third full-length Baby. The previous one, 2019’s Cut and Stitch, was a wonderful album of intelligent, emotional and intense punk rock. It had been a big step up from 2016 Talk of Violence, so I was intrigued to hear what they would come up with this time.

Much remains the same. There’s the familiar angular guitar riffs, mathy song structures, and vocalist Ren Aldridge’s powerful voice mixing snarling rants, guttural screams and the occasional soft croon. The politics are still there, fiery as ever and once again depicting a radical feminist view on the world.

The band themselves say Baby has changed in that it sees Petrol Girls trying to be more irreverent, and certainly the album title seems to reflect that. There are a few one-liners in there, most notably the Stealers Wheel-channeling opening line of Clowns: “We’re the clowns on the left, but they ain’t joking on the right”. But to be honest, Ren Aldridge is unlikely to start moonlighting as a stand-up comedian and the songs which are meant to sound irreverent don’t exactly lighten the tone – they seem more like cutting sarcasm. What works better is when she digs down to find some reserves of optimism – like Unsettle’s refrain of “I don’t want this future, let’s unsettle”.

The band are restlessly creative with arrangements, and I do like the way Fight For Our Lives manages to sound like a street demonstration with its megaphone verses and clanging percussion – like one of the many street demonstrations that still have to happen every time another woman is killed in gendered violence.

As Aldrige points out in Sick and Tired, it can be hard to keep organising and turning out for those marches when change seems to come so slow. Sometimes it’s hard too to keep believing political punk can still stir a listener in the way it did when we first heard it as teenagers. But Petrol Girls, with the classic punk ingredients of guitars, drums, passion, righteous rage and DIY creativity, continue to make a powerful and beautiful racket. Baby finds Petrol Girls still carrying the torch for punk rock to change the world.

- Andy Paine.