TCIYF are a dirty-riffed, crass, thrash punk band with Pule on vocals, Thula on guitar, Tox on bass, and Jazz on drums. Started by members of the Skate Society Soweto family, they’re leading the rule-breaking, Sowetan skate and rock revolution with their uninhibited, conformist-refusal; spitting-out in vulgar lyrics and frantic drum smashes. Fuck your civilisation, with the uncensored and inappropriate thrust of hard-ons and hot tempers. Are you softer if you don’t have to face it?
Most of the articles I’ve read about them say they don’t give a fuck. But that’s bullshit; they just don’t give a fuck about things they’re told to with no reason. They actively smash empty nine-to-five high regard. They’re making new meaning through their own kind of value. These members sweat against the system that would have them punch their lives into the monotonous grind of no-hope. They’re a generation of redefine; tearing down as they build; making the songs, making the videos, making the art, making the events, making the half-pipes, making the subversive sub-culture in all of its unrestrained and unrefined, DIY glory.
It’s self-written, it uses its hands, it’s a fever that licks to the bone and brings blood together. Fatherless kids choosing their family in punk-fuck freedom. It can see the sexless suck-dry and the hollow-out, the ‘two rand, two rand’ Nyaope zombies skulking new victims through the night. It knows the way the haunt takes hold, and the way you have to shake it out; makes spaces for bodies to jump and fall and be lifted and shoved-forward in abandon. They can see you and they’ve got you; real care buried in the reckless purge.
No one’s going to seize this. It’s got the speed of where it comes from. It’s a kind of sacred profanity. Strung-out sincerity unfiltered at five in the morning. It’s a code that can’t be commodified, held up in the kind of respect you never have to articulate to understand; it’s checking-in with your grandmother, turning off the TV, chilling in the crowd before the show, not replacing your brother when he has to disappear for a year, working hard without fronting, disrupting the stage-space by being on the floor with your friends. It’s a new ritual of youth unhindered, staring death down, because no matter what, you’ll have what you created; the justified rage of the impossible moment made real. If all you can see is the filth of provocation, then you can get lost; this is a forceful stripping-down of all the crap that crowds in and it’ll always move faster than your patronising condescension.
Keep glued to TCIYF Facebook page for their upcoming full-length album, kicking-in soon with rapist-slayers and crash-landings from outer space. You can also catch them live, in all their gritty imperfection, at the Hostile Takeover in June. Smash it up and hand it over. The rare breed and the raw edge. Bite more than you can chew. And keep going harder… together; faster, faster, faster, until there’s cum in your face.