Don’t be confused by the maps. Florida is not the South. Florida, for all intents and purposes, is Florida. There is simply no other state like it in the union: a sweltering swamp of retirees, cons avoiding the law, pill-popping miscreants, and the most intriguing batch of weirdo punks assembled in one place. In a line well tread by bands like (personal favorite) the Electric Bunnies, the Jacuzzi Boys, and the demented awesomeness of the Golden Pelicans, comes Lake Worth’s Cop City/Chill Pillars. Donning one of the more art-damaged names in recent memory, it’s fitting that they are also perhaps the strangest to come from this bunch. I highly recommend getting started with last year’s Hosed LP if you’re in for the whole experience, but the “Gift Shop” single is a suitable enough slice to capture the noxious essence of the CC/CP boys.

One of the Sunshine State’s signifiers seems to be a complete void of enhanced fidelities. It’s as if the only conceivable piece of recording equipment is a tape deck on half-speed and a box full of cassettes being worn out well past their expiration. “Gift Shop” ostensibly wobbles and lodges itself off the track more than once. To the band’s credit, it simply adds to the druggy grog they produce using three guitars and three voices, all of which are headed on their own course. Somewhere in the middle makes sense, a type of three-dimensional hallucination of the Residents, perhaps some Brainiac demos, and a lifetime of inhalants. Theirs is a world frighteningly surreal as the gift shops that are synonymous with the tourist traps that dot the Florida landscape—cheap and tacky, yet dark and fascinating at the same time.