New Jersey’s Ocean City has been fighting the riff-raff and troublemakers which threaten “America’s greatest family resort” for decades. Founded by Methodist ministers, the Cape May beach spot has pursued a puritanical alcohol ban since before Prohibition, and like any sanction on fun that’s occurred throughout history, delinquents and ne’er do wells fester under the sanitised facade imbibing on the outlawed and chasing the forbidden. Last year’s EP cover for La-La Land from NJ skatepunk Reckless Randy captured this boozy bulwark to the City’s priggish Blue Laws perfectly; a skeezy clod sporting skulls and daggers tattoos, hi-tech cycling shades, a half-eaten hotdog in one hand and a warm tinny in the other and generally just not giving a fuck.

“I’m an animal, I belong in the zoo!” exalts Randy on the eponymous fourth track from his debut LP Reckless Randy (joining Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and Mötorhead in the ‘same name, song, and album’ club). Taking cues from lo-fi garage rock like The Mummies and Supercharger, Reckless Randy deals in no fuckin’ about R n R wrapped around a dirty drum machine scoring tales of fast cars, stolen liquor, and heavy metal heavies in a knucklehead punk blast that would make Ocean City’s Christian forebearers spin in their grave like Crash Bandicoot on bad speed.

Album opener ‘Hell Bent’ seizes you with its freaky punk swagger and never eases its coke crusted grip off your neck, an utterly infectious and exhilarating surge of surf licks and strutting garage riffs spike every song on the record in a direct and unpretentious way. “Looking For Speed” adds a primitive synthesizer to the weirdo flaunt but never pulls Randy’s lo-fi punk into egg territory, merely using the keyboard to further illustrate the queasy search for methamphetamines late at night. The hot rod acceleration of “Gone Stealin’” hits such a giddy height of electric turbocharge that it seizes you out of your bland domesticity and inspires dreams of throwing bricks through the Walmart window and thieving every keg available. A brief flirtation with faux-goth provides a welcome gear shift on the skulking “Sidewalk Creeper”, a tale of a street muscle with stab wounds given extra haunt with reverb vocals and eerie keyboards.

You know that despite Ocean City being one of NJ’s 32 ‘dry towns’, over 18% drink heavily or binge on alcohol? The miscreant mischief that sees stuffy abstinence as a cause to champion even greater levels of irresponsible hedonism has a hero in Reckless, and his first album proper Reckless Randy is a gloriously oafish and expert slice of pitch-perfect garage rock furore that reminds you exactly where the fun in life is to be had.