AUDIOLITH and FIRE AND FLAMES MUSIC presents the furious debut album of the Belorussian Grrrl-Punks MESSED UP.
MESSED UP are four Grrrls from the city of Grodno near the Polish and Lithuanian border. The Quartet was founded in 2015 with the will to escape the lethargy of its post-Soviet homeland and to face the social expectations and constraints of their own environment with self-empowerment and creativity. In the small Belarusian subculture, which is often affected by repression and incomprehension, at least a temporary escape from everyday society is possible, and tours through other cities and neighboring countries broaden their horizons better than Instagram and Vk.com. The band is quickly at home in a D.I.Y. scene where bands, organizers and clubs know each other well and often have to act on the brink of illegality. Contacts to like-minded musicians with an emancipatory agenda such as MISTER X lead via WHAT WE FEEL to FEINE SAHNE FISCHFILET, who always work closely with the local bands of the anti-fascist scene during their ex-USSR concerts and support them in Germany. After perfectioning their bone-dry, point-to-point punk rock for four years and releasing a digital EP, MESSED UP have released an eleven-song debut album, "Everything You Believe In", featuring melodic punk rock, with vocalist NASTYA recalls with her powerful organ not infrequently to the colleagues of DISTILLERS, HOLE or L7. The band’s Russian lyrics pursue social and political hotspots such as racism, homophobia or social ignorance - developed without slogans from a personal-lyric perspective. In the cover of IGGY POP’s famous song "You Wanna Be My Dog", the text is slightly altered, giving new meaning to an old piece. "Everything You Believe In" is not only the title of the album, but certainly also the engine of this young band, the reason to keep going. They refuse to be a conformist part of the patriarchal and oppressive society of the former USSR. Loudly, they scream out what they reject and continue to sail against the strong wind of the reactionary zeitgeist.