AUDIO: The Motherfuckers – “Were Fucked”
Milwaukee’s underground has always had a habit of resurrecting the loud, the loose, and the completely unhinged — and few local relics fit that description better than The Motherfuckers. The Cream City garage-punk outfit, long revered in the city’s basement-show circles, are back in circulation courtesy of a full-length reissue titled “Were Fucked,” pairing the band’s original 7″ with nine previously unreleased tracks pulled from the vault.
For anyone who missed the first go-round, The Motherfuckers were the kind of band that made a virtue out of chaos. Fronted by the late Booger El Roacho, whose death in 2008 effectively shelved any talk of a proper reunion, the group traded in the sort of snarling, blown-out garage racket that turned Milwaukee dives into pressure cookers. Beer City Records — a longtime champion of the city’s dirtier corners — gave the material the treatment it always deserved, dusting off the tapes and letting the full document breathe as a proper LP.
What’s here is nasty, primitive, and gloriously unpolished. The riffs come at you like a bar fight in slow motion, the vocals sound like they were tracked through a busted PA, and the whole thing plays like a lost transmission from a Milwaukee that no longer exists. If your idea of a good time involves fuzz pedals, cheap beer, and a band that clearly did not care whether you liked them, “Were Fucked” is going to feel like coming home.
Stream the record in full below, and if it moves you, throw a few bucks toward the band’s legacy over on Bandcamp.
