Zine Review: Strig:Oi! #3

Enshittification is one of those ugly words that perfectly describes an ugly process: when an online platform starts out good for its users, then gradually shifts to serving advertisers, investors, and algorithms. At first the changes are small, then they pile up, and suddenly the places where you once found new music, exchanged ideas, or nurtured conversations with friends turns into an endless slop of ads, “recommended” garbage, merch you don’t need, and AI-generated content telling you nothing you actually care about.

Yes, I’m talking about how awful the digital platforms have become and how sad it is to see good people trying to turn even punk reviews and band interviews into slide-format posts and reels for this new digital dystopia. Back in the early 2000s, we were arguing about webzines vs. print zines. Now it’s all reels, soundbites, and TikToks designed to evaporate from your brain the second you scroll past them.

Yet, new punk and hardcore zines are still popping up. A few years ago I’d be raging over lazy one-sentence record reviews, unedited interviews full of typos, weird layouts, and bands answering good questions with half-sentence answers. Now? Even the worst, poorly formatted zines feel more authentic than most of the slop online. At least someone cared enough to put ink on paper, eh?

Anyway, I’ve got the third issue of Strig:Oi! fanzine. It’s a zine coming out of the Greater Wallachia region of Romania. Strig:Oi! started in 2023, and I’ve actually known Cezar since the MySpace era, back when he was doing a zine called No Bollox, Just Oi!. I’ve been hooked on Strig:Oi! since the very first issue, and now issue #3 arrives with another 128 pages of the good stuff.

What I love most about this zine is that Cezar doesn’t fall into the trap of chasing to interview whatever band is trending just to keep an audience happy. Instead, every issue is packed with stories of bands he genuinely likes and cares about. And he asks them the kind of things he actually wants to know, not what he thinks people expect to read. Unlike online zines getting tons of press releases and pleasing record labels with overpromotional crap.

Most of the time I try to read zines front to back like a book, but this time I went straight to the Remdik interview. I’d interviewed the Slovakian antifascist Oi!-hardcore band myself a while before Strig:Oi! came out, and I wanted to see what else they had to say. And honestly, Cezar’s interview is better than mine. His questions address the situation of Roma communities in Slovakia and how the band’s music, activism, and benefit shows push back against the racism and hatred Roma people face in the country.

After that, I jumped into the interview with the Australian football-themed Oi! band Cantona, since I loved their 2024 debut EP on Contra Records. There’s also a nice conversation with the Czech grindcore-turned-rock’n’roll legends Malignant Tumour. And as always, the zine is packed with interviews from bands I hadn’t heard before: Crumble, Day Drinker, Falcata, Fearless Veterans, Grohot, Regnvm Animale, Straight Red, and more.

Each issue of Strig:Oi! also highlights the local Romanian punk scene, covering some of the venues that host punk shows in the country. This time there’s also a slightly out-of-the-box interview with Mircea, the early 2000s Romanian zinester behind MPTY (aka More Punk Than You) zine, who now lives as far from home as Mexico.

A great addition to this issue are the talks with graphic artists like Gatch Rivett and VZR Graphics (Viez). Gatch is a truly amazing lad, deep into Oi! music and scooters, and Viez is someone I’ve known since the first Downfall of Gaia tour through the Balkans, back when he played in bands like Mediocracy. It was great to catch up with where he’s at now. And as always, Strig:Oi! looks fantastic thanks to the now unmistakable artwork of Cristina (MissRhyne). If you’re from the Balkans, you’ll immediately recognize her drawing of the classic home distiller setup, where people boil spirits from plums, grapes, or pears like it’s a national sport.

When I got Strig:Oi! #3, I had just finished watching the three-hour Director’s Cut of Watchmen from 2009, the version that includes the animated Tales of the Black Freighter sidestory. So reading through the issue, MissRhyne’s ongoing comic about the Strigoi character felt like a cool parallel, like the zine’s own Black Freighter woven into the main narrative. And this time the zine doesn’t just come with stickers and an A3 poster of the cover artwork, it also came with a draculesque acorn picked in the misty Wallachian forests at Samhain. Small details, but they show how much care goes into this project.

It took me a long time to finally publish this review, but all the love to Cezar, Cristina, and everyone involved in making StrigOi! what it is. At their best, punk zines don’t just cover bands or introduce punks to new music; they connect people, stitching together the threads of a subculture that would fall apart without them. Maybe there aren’t many folks who give a damn about the Romanian scene or 99% of the bands featured in this issue, but that doesn’t make a zine like this any less valuable. If anything, it makes it even more underground.