Sun Children Sun is. What exactly Sun Children Sun is tends to be a little harder to point down. Whatever it is, it is some of the most essential music you can call “punk” being made anywhere in the world right now, a fact made all the more frustrating by their complete lack of distribution in the US aside from SPHC reissuing their demo as 7” (after Mexico’s Pato Nuclear Records had reissued it as a cassette), and now an LP collecting two of their splits and a new CD-R.

Musically, the most concise description is the Sun Children Sun play noisecore filtered through pop punk, but that spastic, schizoid, almost cut-up approach incorporates everything from hardcore to samba to ska to reggae into it. One can think of them almost as a poppy version of Exithippies’ weirdo techno-noisegrind assault. A connection that seems even more logical if you remember the split that was announced between the them two years ago which has yet to come to fruition. Wild, nearly free-form, daring, and reckless, Sun Children Sun play a unique brand of “punk” that could only have come from Japan — like arguable influence Paintbox or free noise grind masters Sete Star Sept who are doing their best to redefine anything that could be termed “grind.” Own this record and thank Dan at SPHC for continuing to be one of the best labels in the US.