‘It gave me a superpower – question everything’: as punk turns 50, bands from China to Greenland explain how it fires up their lives — SkimNews
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- Andriy Zholob, vocalist of Ukrainian band Beton, served as a frontline surgeon during the war, played guitar on the front lines between combat shifts, and recorded a Clash cover titled Kyiv Calling to raise money for the Ukrainian resistance.
- Wu Wei, who founded Wuhan's first punk band SMZB in 1996, had albums confiscated, performances prohibited and his record label contract terminated by Chinese authorities; now based in the UK, the band released a bilingual 30th-anniversary album titled When the Party Is Over.
- Nao of the Morocco/Spain-based band Taqbir performed anonymously with her face covered inside Morocco's Muslim community and was told she "loved Satan" even in Spain; the band explicitly addresses the overlap of punk, Muslim and queer identity.
- Aditya Naik of India's Punk on Toast received mass online threats after releasing Modified, a critique of the right wing, and the band joined Mumbai's recent Cockroach protests—Naik called punk "the greatest superpower: question everything."
- Abdula Skink of Soweto-based Twenty One Children documents routine police harassment of skaters in historically white neighborhoods in the song Scab, and guitarist Thula built the first DIY skate park in Soweto.
- Henrike Baliu of Brazil's Armada recorded the album Tales of Treason as a warning against right-wing resurgence, drawing a direct line to the original Brazilian punk scene that emerged under the country's 1980s military dictatorship.
Why it matters: Punk's 50-year arc, told across these countries, shows the genre still operates as protest infrastructure in 2025—not a 1970s relic. With Ukrainian bands playing for amputee veterans, Chinese bands losing albums to censors and Indian bands mobilizing for street protests, the testimonies confirm punk's continued function as frontline resistance and personal-survival tool.
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