Show Review: Her New Knife, Cashier, Total Wife, Fib, Bedridden at The Boxing Ring, NYC.
June 19th, 2026.
----------
Julia’s War Records puts on a showcase to celebrate its 5th anniversary
June 20th, 2026
Julia’s War Recordings is the 90’s Sub Pop of 2020’s alternative and shoegaze. Right now they’re in the middle of a three day, three city celebration, marking five years as a label. Last night we raced down to Brooklyn for the New York show, a marathon gig featuring five bands from the Julia’s War roster. Her New Knife, Cashier, Total Wife, Fib, and Bedridden turned up the volume and turned the evening into a high-decibel carnival of sound. Here’s our account of the night:
Bedridden was a morning alarm of beautifully urgent and noisy guitar riffage. They reminded us of a punkier Smashing Pumpkins, in the way that each song felt like it was telling a novel-length story over the span of a few minutes. Their bright siren of a lead guitar satisfyingly cut through the thickness of their overwhelming distortion. We’ve been thinking about how the 2020’s has seen a tsunami swell of shoegaze acts, so many that the genre itself has needed redefining. Our loose definition is “cathartically loud” and Bedridden was exactly that.
The temperature of the showroom increased a few degrees as people packed the floor for Fib. They played with punchy clarity, a conscious decision that shows restraint when a hundred other options exist that allow a band to tap into powerful and overpowering sounds. Their songs were bright and expressive, a sharp contrast to the black walled room of the ring. There was a certain idiosyncraticness to their set that called to mind Dismemberment Plan's legendary Emergency & I.
Total Wife, total life. We were a few rows further back than we wanted to be for this set because the room was really starting to fill up and get really hot. Great DIY and bad ventilation are a match made in Heaven. The faces of this quintet were glistening with sweat as they unleashed a rapid onset storm of a performance. A line in our notes simply says “maximum noise”. They might have felt the intensity of the room temperature and decided on the fly to unload an equally intense sound, there was lots of whispering in ears between band members as if they were playing a mid-set game of telephone. They ended with an extended minutes long noise jam, a singular droning cyclone of frequency that scrambled our senses and felt like sonic sweat.
We will come out and admit now that Cashier’s debut EP The Weight from March is one of our favorite records of 2026. We bought a CD copy at the merch table and stayed in the hot room after Total Wife in order to secure front row positioning. Never before have we heard squealing feedback sound so melodic. A mosh pit of flying limbs opened up in the middle of the floor, but everyone in it was smiling. The pit of ecstasy. That spectacle appropriately captures Cashiers sound. They played a mix of songs from the recent record as well as some self described “new ones” that we can’t wait to be released.
Her New Knife opened with dark and hypnotic notes which caught us slightly off-guard because they intentionally turned the lights up for their set. By the second song we figured out that their secret sauce was an ocean deep, overwhelmingly thick bass tone. There was a confident kind of brutality to their sound that was infectious. It was grinding, like heavy equipment in a junkyard used to shred and destroy the old rusted steel skeletons of other machines. Songs were deconstructive and we felt ourselves getting torn to pieces.
This show was a trip. We spent lots of time looking at the performance rooms two massive murals, a Madonna with a cabbage patch child on her lap and a dramatic renaissance piece, except the characters' faces were covered with insane clown posse makeup. We chatted with several familiar faces and noticed many members of other bands were in attendance. Loitering outside afterwards, we met three stooges visiting from the Carolinas. As we silently tried to guess what they were visibly tweaking on they shared that they had taken molly at the start of the show. Bonkers. Julai’s War fest continues with a Philadelphia showcase tonight and Boston tomorrow. Rrrock on, Rrrat Pack, see you around.
| Keywords: | New York City | Julia's War | Her New Knife | Cashier | Total Wife | Fib | Bedridden |
|---|
