oneilltiernanmaimaggie
The gits are one of my favourite punk bands! I love that the vocals, bass, drums and guitar really work well together creating a really unique sound. I would highly recommend this album to anyone who loves alt rock and punk.
Favorite track: Absynthe (2024 Remaster).
bea_siobhan
The greatest punk band of all time's greatest album. What's more to say? Viva Zapata!
Favorite track: While You’re Twisting I’m Still Breathing (2024 Remaster).
Lute FP
This is great. Female fronted punk rock on another level. Killer song writing, and a vocalist that can do punk, rock, and blues with equal conviction.
When I say this reminds me of killer bands like Amyl and the Sniffers and The Bobby Lees, it’s only because I discovered those first. This band is OG, organic, homegrown from 1992. If I’d heard this album when it came out I would have become a fan of punk rock a whole lot sooner.
Adam Lumber
Simply amazing on all counts, like stepping onto a fast moving punk rock train that you can't get off until the music stops. You can feel the band bursting at the seams, barely managing to constrain their power within these songs. Hopefully there is some other reality where tragedy didn't strike and people got to hear what came next.
Favorite track: Second Skin (2024 Remaster).
okamifanone
This band was destined for greatness, such a shame some jerkoff robbed the world of such a talent...RIP Mia.
Favorite track: Second Skin (2024 Remaster).
Mia Zapata was the greatest rock singer of her time. She may well have been the greatest blues singer in punk rock history, the woman who married the 78 and the ’78. Tragedy did not make this true. Mia Zapata made this true, and the ferocious, spring-loaded shrapnel frame that was built around her by Andy Kessler (guitar: metronomic and furious), Matt Dresdner (bass: fluid, punching, beat-addicted and melodic), and Steve Moriarty (drums: martial and explosive) - who, with Mia, combined to form The Gits - made it true.
The Gits were formed at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in mid-1986, grabbing and swapping pieces of art, thrash, noise, punk rock, classic rock, and all the sorts of magical silly and bookish jingle bells that an old-school liberal arts education handed you; for the next few years they worked on turning it all into something tough, sensitive, both brutal and kind. Andy, Matt, Mia, and Steve moved to Seattle in middish 1989, landing in a house on Capitol Hill where they (and fellow travelers) wood-shedded and rehearsed for the next few years. The Gits put out three EPs in 1990 and ’91 before signing with C/Z Records and releasing their first full-length album, Frenching the Bully. Seattle quickly claimed the quartet as their own and embraced the Gits blend of ferocious fangs and soft heart, the slug/slap of the guitars, and the gorgeous, soft underbelly of the poetic emotions. These qualities not only fit in with the doe-eyed/sharp-clawed grunge ethos but earned the Gits the respect of their peers, including Nirvana, who tapped them to open a major local show in 1990.
Then other stuff happened, and their frantic, confessional barbed-heart snowball began rolling up hill very, very fast; the Gits “quickly” (hah! After half a decade learning to implode and explode hearts and stomping their boots on manifold beer-softened, Marlboro-weeded wood stages!) inspired rapture, awe, and the levitation that happened when peak emotion meets peak grindage in front of amps spitting out something that sounded like the mad marriage of Bolan swagger and Dischord tension… all fronted by a genuinely incomparable woman who held her heart in her mouth and shared it, in all its celebration and fear, without hesitation.
The Gits were an angry, inflamed slinky fully in tune with and tuned by the Bessie Patti Smith of her time, truly the only singer who could summon Joplin, Poly Styrene, Sam Cooke, Iggy Pop and Ian MacKaye all in the same goddamn song.
In 1993, less than four weeks after accepting an offer from Atlantic Records, Mia died. I leave it at that, because this is not about death; it’s about an extraordinary life. I do not say, “You should have been there,” I say, “We are lucky so many of us were, and I am so glad we have this extraordinary evidence of the power and gifts of Mia and the Gits that you now can hold in your hands.” And I note that Frenching the Bully, this extraordinary testament to the soul, shock, fury and feeling of the Gits, has been long out of print on vinyl and CD, and this new edition - remastered by legendary Seattle engineer Jack Endino - joyfully rectifies that.
supported by 72 fans who also own “Frenching The Bully (2024 Remaster)”
After years of only have these sessions on a scratched unmixed CDr it's a sweet surprise to hear them loud and clear the way Steve and the band intended. Mount_Mourn
TV Priest's second record springs forth with a tension, dynamism, and crunch not often found in this brand of broody, shouty post-punk. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 16, 2022
Two tracks of heavy fuzzed out garage punk on its perfect format (7-inch single) taking on the dangers of the attention economy. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 15, 2025
