Published August 18, 2026 at 10:41 AM EDT

"COLD RIBS" is out on Friday, August 21 on Three Lobed Recordings. The band will play a hometown record release show at Lump Gallery on August 29 with Pipe and Cor de Lux.

The Raleigh-based post-punk band RIBS haven't been around for very long, but in the current underground landscape, they've quickly established themselves as one of the best live acts.

After releasing their debut album in 2025, the band is back in 2026 with its follow-up, "COLD RIBS." On it, the band sounds like a well oiled machine – a group of friends who have spent decades developing a musical language known only to them.

Three Lobed Recordings

Cover art for "COLD RIBS."

"I feel like we sound like ourselves," bassist David Mueller said. "The first record was more about finding out what that sound was. After playing together for a couple of years now, things are starting to come out of the factory looking like a RIBS song."

"COLD RIBS" is the band's debut for the North Carolina-based Three Lobed Recordings. Label owner Cory Rayborn said he first heard about the band through his friend David Schwentker and was immediately hooked.

"(David) kept mentioning RIBS and I couldn't help but be intrigued by his enthusiasm as well as the band's lineup," he said.

RIBS consists of four musicians who all have a deep history within the Triangle music scene. Besides Mueller, the band features drummer Josh Germeroth, guitarist Finn Cohen, and vocalist Mike Wallace. Their songwriting style is unique: Mueller, Germeroth, and Cohen start the process by creating experimental and often unwieldy instrumental pieces of music that are eventually passed along to Wallace, who adds his own style and energy to the songs.

Over the years, Wallace has played guitar and sung in bands like Drag Sounds and Verity Den, but RIBS is the first project where he has focused solely on singing. He said that with RIBS, he has more freedom to experiment with his vocals and the structure of his lyrics.

"With (this band), it feels like I can pretty much say anything," he said. "Not that I want to say anything too crazy, but it can be weird and nonsensical and not have a narrative, or it can be very focused on narrative and have a lot of structure."

That type of experimentation is a big part of what makes RIBS work. Germeroth said that making music without worrying about specific structures is therapeutic for him.

"(In RIBS) I'm allowed to play a lot of different styles and push boundaries, and no one pushes back," he said. "It's very much encouraged to come up with the craziest thing you can think of, and then work back from there."

"COLD RIBS" was announced back in June, and with that announcement came the release of its first single, "Not A Boogie." Mueller said the song manifested from a demo that Cohen had written that he initially thought was "totally whack."

"I couldn't believe we were going to have a song that sounded like that," he said. "But once we started playing it, I was like 'Okay, this is good.'"

Cohen said he wrote the initial riff for the song with some help from his five-month old son.

"I started playing that riff and it would make him laugh," he said. "Every time I played it he would start laughing, so I kept doing it. It started off sounding like this terrible southern rock song, a prime candidate to go through our process."

"COLD RIBS" is out on August 21 on Three Lobed Recordings.