The Best Songs of the 2010s: Black Rabbit, “Nicky Says”

The titular echo of The Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” here is surely no accident. At times, Black Rabbit sound like they could be playing one of Andy Warhol’s happenings with some sort of trippy light show projected on them. They may have rocked a little too hard for a Factory crowd though; the CBGB stage a few years later might have been the better fit. Sure enough, frontcouple Marc and Darlene Scarano used to play CBGB, sweating on the same stage as The Ramones and Dead Boys once did, albeit several decades later.

They channel that entire sonic lineage, pulling Lou Reed through the Ramones, injecting ’70s punk power chords into the trippier side of ’60s garage-rock. The band’s heavy-rock history doesn’t end at 1979, either; they nod to Josh Homme’s pre-Queens of the Stone Age band Kyuss in this song’s first line. A post-CBGB move to Vermont didn’t dull their edge, and on “Nicky Says” they distilled their many influences into their own classic of punk and garage.

Check out more entries in our month-long series on The Best Songs of the 2010s.