This past Saturday, Toronto band Republic of Safety released its latest CD, Succession, to a local crowd of revellers and well-wishers. The party, I hear, went all night. And with good reason—Succession marks the Republic’s final release, and Saturday the band’s final show.

The band made the decision a couple of months back, not long after finishing the new EP; with the group’s main leaders Maggie MacDonald and Jonny Dovercourt headed in two different musical directions, it seemed obvious to them that the Republic’s days were numbered. For those of us not so in tune with the band’s personnel, though, we only heard about this about two weeks ago. In a way you could say Republic of Safety kinda sprung the announcement on us, but I guess border closures and refugee evacuations tend to be surprise affairs anyways.

Republic of Safety leaves behind three EPs and twelve songs—not an extensive discography, perhaps, but one full of gems nonetheless. The band began as a political agitprop garage punk band of sorts, though obviously one with a sense of humour; even to the end the band kept up the schtick of giving everyone in the band a minister title and claiming the Republic of Safety was a real country located off the coast of Torontopia. But over the years the band has mellowed their sound a bit and made friends with the Isles of Melody, and the running joke in interviews was that Succession was the band’s most commercial outing yet—a fantastic way of maintaining your street cred, since the band now has no way of capitalizing on whatever wider success Succession might face.

Unfortunately, it also means that if you’re just discovering Republic of Safety now, you’ve missed the boat. Dovercourt says he plans to take a bit of time off to collect himself and contemplate his musical future, while MacDonald’s thinking of taking things in a more synth-folk direction (maybe this explains how the band grabbed the Toronto opening spot for the Blow this past summer), which means it’s unlikely you’ll hear MacDonald shouting slogans over broken-glass guitar riffs anytime soon. If it’s any consolation, there’s an entire nation of refugees who feel your pain.

I make a lot of recommendations about albums you should listen to. Here’s a recommendation about an album you should avoid: the self-titled debut from British duo Prinzhorn Dance School. Many bands suffer from a lack of imagination and depth, resulting in a lot of albums that find a stylistic box and snuggle comfortably in it for forty minutes or so. But Prinzhorn Dance School take this lack of musical wanderlust to an extreme; it’s like in the universe of Prinzhorn Dance School, there are only three notes and four rhythms, and the album is in fact a scientific reference document organizing all the possible permutations into sixteen very similar sounding tracks, so that subsequent studies can simply refer to “You Are the Space Invader” or “Black Bunker” instead of writing out the whole pattern of notes each time. If you’ve heard one track—and you’re about to—you’ve heard them all.

It’s not just the similarities between tracks, either; Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn have made minimalism their main concern, with most tracks dominated by little more than a repetitive bass line, a repetitive guitar riff, and the almost random beats of a seemingly distracted drummer. And then there’s Prinz’s mimicry of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, in that he barely sings at all and prefers to not-quite-shout musings from a distance, backed up occasionally by Horn’s shouting of slogans during the choruses. In all, a very basic formula, run aground over the course of the album.

Okay, so not a great long player then, and the formula itself seems to wear itself very thin on paper. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why Prinzhorn Dance School shouldn’t work—and yet here’s “Crackerjack Docker,” a perfectly sinister song (accompanied by a perfectly sinister video) that seems too simple to be effective, but somehow burrows deep into your skull and never leaves. The lyrics are absurd and the song itself is barely a skeleton. But dismiss it at your peril, like I did halfway through the first listen, for soon enough you might find yourself playing it again. And again. And again. And again.

Glass Candy’s been through more stylistic upheavals than I can possibly keep track of. Not that I’d be a good person to track that progression anyways; my sole exposure to the Portland group’s work is three songs that bookend their nearly decade-long career. 2007’s “Miss Broadway” appears on the Italo disco compilation After Dark, an album that sits somewhere in a huge “listen to this sometime so you know what the kids are on about” pile. Like so many niche genres invented before I was born, Italo disco is a cipher to me; aside from a couple of names propping up the style’s recent revival, I can’t tell you a damned thing about it. So in terms of explaining Glass Candy’s career, I’m a dismal failure; I can’t even describe to you the greater context of the band’s current work.

What I can offer you instead is a look into the group’s distant past, back when electroclash was just beginning to gain traction thanks to the likes of Ladytron. Back then the group was called Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre, a name that I guess became too unwieldy over the years. “Brittle Women” appears on the band’s first album, 2003’s Love Love Love, but by then Glass Candy had already changed its sound. Re-recorded for the album, the 2003 version of “Brittle Women” sounds like a darker, tortured Blondie tribute. When originally recorded in 1999, “Brittle Women” was a lot less subtle and exuded less of that glam coolness. Instead of channelling Debbie Harry, singer Ida No takes a more theatrical, half-shouted approach, to arguably greater effect. The rest of the band sounds more garage than new wave, too; but then could you ever imagine glossy new wave on Portland indie label K Records?

The gritty agitprop garage punk sound is worlds away from the slick euro synthesizers of Glass Candy circa 2007. Now that the band have found a comfortable niche—members of the band also assist with Italo disco luminaries the Chromatics, as well as having a hand in After Dark’s production—it’s unlikely the early part of Glass Candy’s career will ever gain much attention except for a brief biographical mention. As historical footnotes go, though, “Brittle Women” has more attitude and verve than most.