An Interview with The Oidz

An Interview With

The Oidz

Few articles need to explain the genre in question, but this is almost essential for The Oidz, egg punk’s finest trailblazers in Leeds and beyond. For the uninitiated, this isn’t a food-based gimmick, but a hybrid as brilliantly bizarre as its name suggests: new wave meets garage rock mania and the brash simplicity of punk; resulting in ridiculous speeds, uber-short tracks, and total unpredictability. 

The Oidz encapsulate the genre’s weirdo charm, echoing The Coneheads, one of their favourites. Where that band’s original wave borrowed more from hardcore and punk styles, guitarist Ben Parry describes the newer iteration as having a “more solidified” sound. “I don’t know any other UK egg punk bands, because it’s such an online genre with a really international sound. We sound similar to Billiam and Tee Vee Repairman, and they’re both from Oz.” 

Citing the similarly lysergic noise of Beige Banquet and Tommy Cossack, drummer Luc Gibbons is modest about their contribution to the genre’s growth while cherishing that “it’s nice that we’ve started something that wasn’t massive in the UK”, in terms of the spread of what he terms “fast garage punk with silliness.” 

Elaborating on their inability to be pigeonholed, Parry explains how the sampler made their debut headline show even wilder. “We did a Coneheads cover we’d learned the day before and we didn’t know what Summer should do, so she just hit a bunch of samples. It was about 40 seconds, but it made it so stupid and funny.” These electronics – including “synths and sampler pads, and a lot of the time it’s recorded to a drum machine” – are, crucial to the band’s unique, queasy energy. 

This well-constructed absurdity is an overarching aspect of egg punk. From their riffs to their song titles, The Oidz take their silliness completely seriously. Their sampling, for example, was simply introduced to enhance their hysterical anarchy. ‘Poorly Bleaker’ and ‘boob_’, the band names trialled before the children’s toy inspired moniker they settled on as an ode to their 2000s youth, act as further proof of this neat balancing act. Alongside that, the band were truly born when their popularity outgrew its original purpose – an outlet for fun. 

But The Oidz are far more than their online humour, surrealist sonics, and berserk performances, having built their virtually entire existence on resolutely DIY morals. From cassettes and a self-made EP cover (by vocalist Summer Crane), badges to basement recordings, they are as subculturally pure as bands like Buzzcocks. Rather than a classic punk method, though, word of mouth spread around Leeds via Google Drive links, appreciation growing in unexpected ways. “Someone told me that some kids had a listening party for the EP as well, which is pretty cool”, Luc reveals. 

Their debut EP, the first release on the Prison Affair label from their eponymous genre comrades, furthers this trait. With more music soon, Leeds can only get eggier and punkier.

Words by James Kilkenny. Picture from the band.