Panic Shack: Panic Shack
Vinyl | CD | DL
Released: 18 July 2025
Panic Shack create the soundtrack for the summer of 2025 with such fun and exuberance that you want to join them in the beer garden.
It’s a bit lazy to say that Panic Shack are like the Spice Girls on Tennent’s Extra, but that’s how they come across – a fantastic sense of exuberance and an in your face unashamed pleasure in making bouncy punk pop songs. But with half the band coming from the South Wales Valleys it’s unlikely any of them would ever be Posh Spice – call them all Fun Don’t Give A Fuck Spice.
Their debut album has been hotly anticipated, but if they felt any pressure to deliver, it certainly isn’t in evidence with eleven songs that burst through your speakers with as much excitement as a hen night during happy hour. What comes across most of all is just the utter joy of being four young women hanging out and making music with your mates. Those four women are Sarah Harvey (vocals), Meg Fretwell (guitar/backing vocals), Romi Lawrence (guitar/backing vocals), Em Smith (bass/backing vocals) and Nick Williams (drums). They formed in 2018 having no prior musical experience but a desire to stick two fingers up at, what they saw, as the “members-only club” atmosphere of indie and punk scenes. “Boys make it look so hard,” Em says. “Whenever I see someone on the floor fiddling with their pedals with a face like a slapped arse I think, you’re making this look so unattainable and it’s actually so fucking easy.”
Comparisons with Amyl and the Sniffers are also there, Panic Shack have the same exuberant two fingers, non-apologetic living life the way they want to attitude, and it’s interesting that the party sounds you hear at the start of the album were recorded in the beer garden at an Amyl & the Sniffers gig. Girl Band Starter Pack is the perfect opening to what will come. It’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun on speed and it creates the party vibe that the four friends take with them everywhere they go.
Photo credit: Ren Faulkner
That girl gang feel is accentuated by the 50s style backing vocals from the band that is reminiscent of classic bands like the Ronettes. Hear them on the hilarious Tit School which opens like a superhero theme tune and becomes a great pogo along punk song that has more ding-dongs than a Carry On film: I didn’t go to Brit school/I went to tit school/I didn’t get straight As/I got double Ds/ I used to smoke around the back/now I’ve got a smokin’ rack.
Those backing vocals are also used to great effect on track Pockets which chronicles a typical night out with the band counting off the essentials that are required before heading out the door: Vape/Phone/Keys/Lift off! The song explores the difficulties of having no pockets: Got my vape in my bra / Drink in my hand. In explaining the existential lyrics Sarah says, “I literally had no pockets.”
There are some great bass riffs, such as on Lazy with its adolescent praise of inertia in the style of the Beastie Boys, and Gok Wan with it’s rapped/spat out words that attack the media’s obsession with (female) body image, using a cut and paste lyric from actual magazine headlines. The bass and the raucous drums drive the beat, letting the guitars snarl and explode in excitement.
The cut and paste approach to lyrics is used to hilarious effect on another bass driven song, Unhinged, where the lyrics are comprised solely of actual Hinge profiles. A few examples are: Dating me is like dating a rock/ I can run backwards really quickly/ I’m weirdly attracted to intelligence/ Speak French to my dog. It’s really fucking funny and the band were right to let the words speak for themselves and make no comment.
Do Something and Personal Best are driven by punky melody and rhythm, but it’s not all one dimensional. On We Need To Talk About Dennis there is definite undertones of The Slits and there is a tension which is created by the empty spaces and the guitar’s ominous echo. And there are darker themes, such as on SMELLARAT where the band relate a story about those weird, creepy hangers-on that can plague women and often tip over into full on sexual harassment.
But the album ends on the optimistic energy of the indie sounding Thelma & Louise. It’s a love song to the band themselves and the bond they feel. It has the summer feel of hitting the road as outlaws and sticking together through thick and thin. Are any relationships as beautiful, or remembered so affectionately, as those we forge in the years as we emerge from childhood into the adult world?
The album is a wonderful celebration of youth and if you are around the same age as Panic Shack then this album will become your soundtrack for the summer of 2025; and when you listen to it again in twenty years’ time it will bring back a flood of good memories.
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You can find Panic Shack online here, LinkTree, Facebook, X, Instagram and TokTok .
All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Instagram.
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