Lo-Fi Punk

Lo-fi punk is punk rock defined by its recording conditions: songs captured at home on four-track cassette machines, cheap digital recorders or phones, with hiss, clipping and room noise left in as a badge of authenticity. The aesthetic descends from 1980s hardcore demo culture and the budget-rock garage underground of *The Mummies* and *The Gories*, and flowered again in the 2000s, when *Jay Reatard*, *Wavves* and the cassette underground made deliberate primitivism a stance against studio polish. Short, fast and immediate, it treats the demo as the definitive version and the underground tape or download as its natural format.