Negative Gears hail from Sydney’s Marrickville neighborhood, where they’ve spent the past half-decade writing, recording, and otherwise perfecting their sophomore 12″ in their studio space. Moraliser, the follow-up to the band’s 2019 debut, finally dropped Friday, and it shows off that hard work in the best way. The album is full of hard-charging Aussie punk songs topped off with layers of new-wavey texture. It sounds like it belongs on our Cold War nuclear anxiety playlist from a few years back, though as the band explains in the Bandcamp bio, the songs are more fixated on grotesque self-centered materialism:

A lot of the record is about gross things that exist in this city, gross attitudes, selfishness, obsession with wealth and status, ignorance for anything outside of Sydney. It’s an abhorrently un-altruistic place. This shit hole wants to be America and it brings the worst out in people but also the best, the underground communities are stronger and tighter because the divide between the two is so vast.

Like seemingly every cool punk record out of Australia, Moraliser was mastered by Mikey Young of Total Control. Stream it below.

Moraliser is out now on Static Shock/Urge.