They’re continents apart. Mumbai. Vennesla. Two rooms, two climates, no shared time zone, no shared breath. Just a signal dragging riffs through lag and latency, pressed flat and grainy through inboxes and cables that probably weren’t built to carry this kind of weight. But it works. Somehow. It still works. And that’s the part that gets under your skin.

There’s a very specific kind of ghost that haunts post-’90s alt rock—bands caught between the death of the major label gold rush and the digital Wild West that followed. Year of the Rabbit is one of those bands, not a bridge but a brick thrown across the chasm. A flare in the fog. The kind of record that disappears in real time and still manages to leave scars.

Bob Log III doesn’t play shows. He commits musical arson. One man, one guitar, one boot, one helmet, and a phone receiver duct-taped to his face like a CB radio from hell, barking transmissions from the last real dive bar in the universe. He is the bastard child of a juke joint and a demolition derby. You don’t discover him—you survive him.

It sounds like a dare. Like a prank pulled on Epic Records’ A&R department in 1994—“Let’s sign these D.C. freaks who sound like Queen on dissociatives and see what happens.” What happened was Pony Express Record, a twisted, glittered monolith of broken pop and math-punk dementia that sounds less like a collection of songs and more like a sonic skin condition. You don’t listen to it, you wear it. And it itches.

There’s a kind of confidence you can’t fake. The kind that doesn’t beg to be liked, doesn’t audition for your playlist. It walks into the bar, steals your drink, and tells a better story than you ever could—all while tuning a busted guitar. That’s Jersey Girls. Not a statement, not a breakthrough. A flex.

There were never any flowers for Failure. But with Fantastic Planet, they made the kind of record that haunts the air long after the transmission ends. Like Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards didn’t craft these songs—they found them buried under reactor ash and starlight, humming faintly through lead walls.