Dazy – Bad Penny
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Lame-O Records
I’m gonna let you guys in on a little secret: these past few years, I’ve been taking MSD. That’s not a drug, rather the triumvirate of Militarie Gun, MSPAINT, and Dazy.
The first of these bands to appear on my radar was Dazy, the Richmond, Virginia-based power-punk project of James Goodson. This happened after someone (probably Ian Cohen) tweeted a link to MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD, a compilation that binds together the project’s first 24 tracks into a surprisingly compact 52-minute package. Between that release’s cover and the fact that it was put out by Convulse Records, I fully went into that album thinking this would be a hardcore band, so imagine my surprise when I was met with one catchy, hook-filled noise-pop banger after another. Most of the tracks hovered around two minutes long with lyrics that spin out common phrases into astonishingly simple sing-alongs that sounded timeless in a ‘how has this song never existed until now?’ type of way.
Early on in 2022, Dazy teamed up with Militarie Gun for “Pressure Cooker,” an easy choice for song of the year, if not decade – effortlessly infectious, endearing, and energizing. That same year, Militarie Gun’s All Roads Lead To The Gun and its sequel worked their way into my running playlist, and by the fall, those EPs were bound together into a quasi-full-length. This deluxe edition built out another four songs on top of those two EPs, including a track called “Can’t Get None,” featuring MSPAINT.
In 2023, MSPAINT’s full-length Post-American burned a flag and all the symbols of man with a guitarless synth-led take on punk that thrashed and writhed in the wake of an undeniably decaying and evil world. That album included a track called “Delete It,” featuring, you guessed it: Militarie Gun.
As these bands continued to burrow into their respective styles, they worked at varying levels of output. Dazy moved the fastest and remained the most prolific. By the end of 2022, the one-man band signed to Lame-O Records and released OUTOFBODY and OTHERBODY, plus a couple of EPs and loosies. Militarie Gun surprised everyone when they signed to Loma Vista for their debut and followed that up with a stripped-down acoustic release featuring Bully, Mannequin Pussy, and a NOFX cover. MSPAINT moved the slowest and most intentionally, content to tour, collab with under-the-radar rockers, and keep out of the new music rat race.
Throughout it all, these three bands continued to work together in interesting ways, whether it was Dazy and MSPAINT on “It’s Only A Secret” or Militarie Gun and Dazy trying to recreate the Pressure Cooker energy on “Tall People Don't Live Long.” This led me to create the following playlist (and painstaking cover art), collecting each band’s discography since they were all working together and circling the same thing in interesting ways.
Cut to current day, and 2025 seems to be a banner year for each of these groups. Early on in the spring, MSPAINT dropped No Separation, an EP that re-upped the group’s industrial punk sound and sharpened their edges in exciting ways. Last week, Militarie Gun dropped their sophomore record God Save The Gun (including a couple songs co-written by James Goodson of Dazy), and as of today, Dazy has unleashed a seven-track EP in the form of Bad Penny.
By and large, Bad Penny doesn’t radically change the Dazy formula in any major way, but when your shit sounds this tight, who cares? Whether it’s a 24-song compilation or a three-track EP, the Dazy sound is one that just seems directly wired to the pleasure centers of my brain. The guitars are fuzzy and beautiful, the drums are resilient and reliable, Goodson’s voice is confident and clear – perhaps the most unobscured he’s ever sounded across the project’s however-many songs. He seems to be playing around a bit more with adding and subtracting individual elements, but generally, each track winds up into a dependable 100+ bpm jaunt. This is music that should be soundtracking a main character chasing after the bus on his skateboard during the last day of school. Instead, we’re stuck trying to evoke and recapture that energy as the atrocities mount up and things get worse and worse.
I think the titular final song really sums all this up nicely, as we hear someone ask, “What type of experiments do you do? If a song becomes an experiment, what does it become an experiment in? How loud you can do it, or how short it can be, or what extreme feelings you can express? How do you approach it?” to which someone responds, “to make it sound cool.” Yeah, that’s just about it.
