[as seen on Treble]

On July 24, Chicago punks Cel Ray release their full-length debut Cel Rayzer via Exploding In Sound. And today they’ve released the first single from the album, “Price of Gas,” a blistering 90 seconds of nervy Devo-esque new wave colliding with blistering hardcore (egg-core?). It packs a political allegory of the cost-of-living-obsessed American everyman and compresses it into an explosive burst of punk rock that merges the contemporary infectiousness of a band like Artificial Go with the furious roar of Bad Brains. It’s a ripper, but that’s kind of an understatement. Hear this absolute firecracker of a song below.

Cel Ray vocalist Maddie Daviss said in a statement, “This song is a rock opera from the perspective of an American man who is obsessed with the price of gas. He has bottled all his troubles and resentments at the country into the rising gas prices, and how they are keeping him down. He desperately wants to impress his wife, provide for his family, and be behind the wheel constantly, but the cost of living keeps rising without him. He blames the price of gas and his wife for his unlucky lot in life to the point of madness, never seeing the bigger picture.

“Song started as a bit after the boys had written a really good song and I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to ruin it with the most obtuse lyrics possible. However the Gas price man quickly took on a life of his own and exists everywhere AND becomes more relevant day by day with an increasingly worse country … I never wrote down actual lyrics for this song because the Gas Price man would take over my body to sing of his various troubles… over time it became much more about blaming his wife for some reason? Lol best song ever”