Before launching his widely praised solo phase, Jay Reatard closed out his group work with Angry Angles, a unit that reshaped punk, new wave, and girl-group pop into a blistering, high-energy style across a small run of singles and EPs. The band came together in 2005 once Reatard’s earlier group Lost Sounds had dissolved, bringing in Alix Brown from Atlanta’s Lids—who was also Reatard’s girlfriend then—alongside a rotating drum seat filled at different points by Die Rotzz’s Paul Artigues and Ryan Rousseau of Tokyo Electron and Destruction Unit. Their explosive first single, “Things Are Moving,” appeared in 2005 on the Shattered Records label that Brown and Reatard ran together, after which they issued the “Blockhead” single via Germany’s P. Trash imprint and joined the Reatards and Tokyo Electron for a three-way split EP that documented their European tour toward the end of that year. The following year saw the release of the “Apparent-Transparent” single, a split with Digital Leather, and a showcase slot at the South by Southwest Festival; yet Brown and Reatard’s separation later in 2006 brought Angry Angles to a close. Goner assembled every recording the band had made—including several tracks that had never surfaced before—into a self-titled compilation in 2016.
