Mixing garage rock, disco, punk, new wave, and metal into cleverly dumb, in-your-face songs celebrating hedonism in multiple forms, Electric Six emerged from the same late-'90s/early-2000s Detroit garage-punk scene that produced the White Stripes and the Dirtbombs. They found international success through a relentless touring and recording schedule and an unerring commitment to their over-the-top style, delivering energy and absurdity in equal measure. After winning a local following as the Wildbunch, Electric Six scored a major hit in the U.K. in 2003 with the song "Danger! High Voltage," and their debut album Fire, released the same year, earned them a major cult following with tunes like "Dance Commander" and "Gay Bar." From that point on, musicians would come and go from the Electric Six lineup and the proportions of electronics to guitars would shift back and forth from album to album, but their essential formula of dance-friendly rock brimming with bombast and lunacy would never change. From 2005 onward, not a year would go by without a new E6 album and a string of shows in which Dick Valentine and co. would whip their fans into a frenzy. While the COVID-19 pandemic put them on pause for a while, 2021's covers set, Streets of Gold, put them back on their unstoppable schedule, and 2023's Turquoise, a set of originals, presented them in high spirited and irresponsible form.

While Messer Chups’ sound is hard to neatly categorize, it is embraced by fans of rockabilly, horror punk, vintage surf records, Italian slasher films, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Pulp Fiction, lounge music, the theremin, The Cramps, and the theme song from The Munsters. Their catchy music combines surf, vintage Russian melodies, rare film samples from the 50s and 60s, scratchy historical recordings, and lounge loops. Live, they explode with garage-punk intensity, all played against a video-collage backdrop of mid-century trashy cult and horror movie clips featuring Russ Meyer and Ed Wood, and superstars like Vampira and Bela Lugosi in a zombie mash-up.