INSTITUTE - The Shooter 7"

Highly recommended.

"In conjunction with Institute’s first-ever Australian tour, a new three-song EP by these long-running and much-loved Texas punks.

“The Shooter” instantly secures its spot on the list of Institute’s very best songs, carrying forward the melodic anarcho-punk influences (see: Zounds and Crisis) the band has explored since their infancy, but transforming them by leveraging the members’ accumulated decades of experience making potent, punk-informed music.

The song’s lyrics are as straightforward and confrontational as any first-wave anarcho classic, but they attack a topic of the utmost relevance to the United States in 2026: the fiction of the “good guy with a gun.” Musically, “The Shooter” is an exquisitely layered fabric of jagged rhythms and plaintive melody, propelled into the aesthetic stratosphere when a chiming acoustic guitar breaks into the mix.

The EP’s other two songs explore the remote poles of Institute’s intensity levels, with “A Privilege” edging toward hardcore—its jittery rhythm built around a short but infectious loop of lead guitar—while “Why Are These Men Still Alive” stretches out, its lumbering rhythm recalling longer story-songs like the Velvet Underground’s “The Gift,” while the eastern-tinged fuzz guitar echoes the moment when Indian raga collided with psychedelic pop in the mid-1960s.

Though this EP only offers three tracks, it’s as essential as anything Institute has released thus far; if you’re lucky enough to be down under for the gigs, I’m sure it’ll make a great souvenir, but it’s still an essential grip for punks worldwide." - Daniel Lupton