Jukebox Check-In • "Missfit" by Swo

I fell in love with The Misfits’ (I’m not calling them just “Misfits,” that’s annoying) music in early 2023. At that point I was already familiar with their “Friday the 13th” single, but I really started to get into their earlier stuff during my senior year of high school. (Sadly, the F13th single does not hold up.) Their music spoke to my weird, rotten heart—while almost every tune in our all-encompassing songbook revolves around stuff like falling in love or heartbreak, most Misfits songs are among the lines of “Aren’t aliens fuckin’ dope?” and “I love this Vincent Price movie and I’m gonna scream at you about it.” And when they do revolve around love, it’s about fawning over a vampiress (“Vampire Girl,” one of my favorite songs of all time) or… fawning over a vampiress again (Vampira). Hey—I’m more of an Elvira kinda guy, but to each their own.

Cut to the beginning of 2026—I’m getting back into BandCamp, finding good music to load onto my Innioasis Y1 MP3 player as I transitioned away from the ICE-supporting, Joe-Rogan-Experience-funding, AI-obsessed Spotify and just third-party-streaming in general. I wasn’t finding anything that stuck with me (unlike my last dip in July 2025 where I discovered Andrew Allen’s Smooth Federation and alyzea’s Frutiger Aero masterpiece, dream OS). Out of sheer desperation, I searched for “Astro Zombies,” one of my favorite Misfits tracks, to find any covers that might lead to the discovery of a new band. Lo and behold, I came across Swo’s version, downloaded it, loaded it onto my Innioasis Y1 player, and fell in love.

Since then, I’ve listened to both of their cover albums—Missfit and Missfit: Side B—countless times and… I gotta admit, I prefer them much more than the originals. (It also helps that The Misfits themselves are iffy to me [Well, all of them except the guy named “Dr. Chud” funnily enough] and the worst thing Swo has done, to my knowledge, is use AI-generated artwork for one of their album covers.) I still love The Misfits’ stuff, but Swo’s covers fit the energy you think stuff like “Night of the Living Dead” or “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?” should have. I find that Danzig and the rest of the pale-faced Fiends try to have their cake and eat it too—they want to sing funny, corny stuff like “Return of the Fly” and “I Turned Into a Martian,” but they also want to be tough-guy punks who beat people up at their concerts. Swo’s versions are just plain fun, which is exactly how I like my music and my horror. It’s Evil Dead 2, it’s Return of the Living Dead, it’s a deck of 1960’s Mars Attacks! trading cards. It’s also a nice way to enjoy post-Danzig Misfits without also supporting that cancerous cuntface Michale Graves. (Props to every venue that’s turning him away—rot in Hell, you Proud Boy!)

Information about Swo (pronounced “Sue”) is scant. According to the description of their one YouTube video (an upload of the Missfit album), the lineup consists of “Alice Malice” on vocals, simply “Dean” on Guitar/Bass, and “CatJunkie” on drums. There’s not a single social media site linked on their Bandcamp site—which I have to respect but is also why I haven’t heard anyone talk about them before. According to the tags underneath their stuff, they’re based in Los Angeles, which isn’t too far away from me actually! Great. Now I have to see them live—if only they had any possible information about that listed on their page…

Check out the album here and catch up on the history of The Misfits here!

[This review was originally posted on 3/23/2026 via my Patreon. Subscribe for just $1.50 a month and get early access to not only my book/movie/TV/album reviews, but to my artwork, comics, and creative writing, too!]