Your new favorite band Mini Golf Water Feature readies one of the year’s biggest releases for Musical Fanzine; press photo courtesy of Ellen Rumel.

The PNW remains one of the northern stars of the world’s sprawling DIY underground communities, networks, creative conclaves, and so on. As the chronicles of history have gone to show, the freewheeling spirit of angst and the ecstasy emerge from that northwest passage that bridges gaps between generations, eras, styles, pastiche presentations of genres, where the concerns for stylistic conventions are collapsed in the name of something that feels urgent, immediate, current, and classically post-modern.

Every so often an artistic phenomenon arrives on the scene that embodies an energetic and anarchic abandon into the collective consortium of visionaries committed to the craft of something you can feel, think, taste, psychically sense, smell, imagine, actualize, et al. A band that strikes a primordial chord within the chasms of consciousness, sounds that remind you of the first album or single you ever purchased or purloined from a sibling or friend that traded in decidedly more discerning taste than many. An ecstatic noise, a fuzzy amplified epiphany that causes you to drop everything you’re doing, makes the world around you dissolve, where every material construct disintegrates and all that remains is the artwork itself that connects to those precious perceptions of the unconscious. Art that attaches itself to the most guarded areas of introverted observations, an empathetic orchestration of art that makes the listener feel included and less alone in the world (even if experienced as an otherwise solitary act of listening on headphones by one’s lonesome).

Introducing Mini Golf Water Feature, from Tacoma, Washington with the debut album Discography 2024-2025. The band’s first proper physical release, courtesy of DIY stalwarts Musical Fanzine; it includes works from their previous digital releases putt, Crop Circles, Stupid Car, as well as a host of new material. The quartet of Nat Peterman, Audrey White, Ollie Nattrass, and Nick Pollock make music to accompany the modern condition of pervasive maladies, ennui, exhaustion, consumption for the sake of consumption, the veracity of vehicular venerations, and a bevy of emotively imbued observations. Rolling out the terroir driven mouth of gravel and mulch is the premiere of “Dirt Eater” from one of the most entertaining, exciting, and beloved surprise releases of 2025.

The band jumps from the northwest corner of the states down to Southern California’s favorite tourist trap “Anaheim” like a vivid flashback of theme park memories. Mini Golf Water Feature venture down the interstate with a road-tripping sound that feels like a throwback to early 90s music videos one might watch on a too-cool-for-school curation of 120 Minutes. The pseudo-obsessive automobile motif can be heard on the epic dusty road trail of “Utah” that plays out in a series of movements and sections that runs the gamut with both an evocative and mathematical attention to the song’s composition. The feelings and freneticism are raised up high on “Pinto’s Song” that escalates in a gradual stair stepping ascension that is manic, paranoid, and unhinged with a addictively memorable passion.

Auto-shop arts with Mini Golf Water Feature; photographed by Ellen Rumel.

The “Eleanor Rigby”-esque requiem "Dead Lady" solemnly marches like a funereal procession dirge grieving for the finite state of human mortality. The punk hop of "Winchester" shines a light on the band implementing a tight economy, whilst working with big, bold, bright, and brilliantly expressive chords, and rhythms. Venturing into the psychic scenes is the balladry bop of "Crop Circles" that transforms the corporal body into an instrument that offers views into the future. From lampooning electric cars in "Utah" to "Stupid Car", MGWF continues to denounce our society's fixation on people movers, transportive vessels, and all of their faulty and suspect incarnations [an anti-car song that goes in directions you can’t even imagine from Flintstones reruns, expired vitamins, and other exclamatory events revolving around combustible engines, and Hanna-Barbera lore].

Tracks like "Dirt Eater" highlight how Mini Golf Water Feature are one of the most original bands around right now. Don't call it math rock, don't call it prog rock, but rather something akin to a group that operates according to a synergistic ethos of intuitively crafting songs that leap through multiple chapters, spanning a range of thoughts, emotions, and unpredictable arrangements that are completely captivating and totally surreal. The madcap genius of “Dirt Eater” is its distillation of the Mini Golf Water Feature flow, where they adeptly incorporate shambling fall-on-the-floor chords into what are complex pieces of power garage pop. The band pours out their heart, soul, fears, fundamentals, bringing it all to the foundation of sod, and sediment, with a gravel cup du jour in a human catharsis of harmonic and primal deliveries.

The band follows up the down to earth epic with the expressive and candid "Egg", closing it out with the subdued morning fog of "May Pole" that feels like a misty spring morning. As Discography 2024-2025 beautifully illustrates: Mini Golf Water Feature is a sound, a sentiment, a Dadaist bouquet of styles that shines out from Tacoma for the whole world to hear. A record that will catch many off guard with their own beguiling uniqueness that feels so new, vaguely familiar, and yet something that is absolutely their own: MGWF is the essential people's band that you never knew you needed. No longer just the best kept secret among the PNW DIY insiders: Discography 2024-2025 indicates a prollifc band for all to share in their visions of limitless inspirations.

Mini Golf Water Feature live, and bathed in the blue light; photographed by Trevor Gallo.

Nat Peterman provided some insights into the creative processes at work in the Mini Golf Water Feature camp:

These three demos are some of the first songs we’ve written where we feel capable of delivering what we’ve always wanted mini golf water feature to sound like. We all took up new instruments to play in this project so we couldn’t exactly execute right away; it’s taken about two years of patience and marination [sic] for us to finally feel like we’re heading in the right direction.

Lounging about in the green grass with Mini Golf Water Feature; photographed by Ellen Rumel.

Our writing process is pretty all over the place. It usually starts with a guitar line played every day for months before we all come together and add our own bits to the song. Mini golf is a very collaborative project and things always seem to end up coming together in the only way they ever could have.

Mini Golf Water Feature’s debut album Discography 2024-2025 will be available August 25 via Musical Fanzine.

Catch them on the road with fellow Tacoma, WA and Musical Fanzine group hidden driver.

August

26 - Olympia, WA at Le Voyeur - tour kickoff with Mike Huguenor, Fastener
27 - Portland, OR at Kellys Olympian with Dooley, Salmon Doza
28 - Arcata, CA at the Gnomestead with Keep, Icarus & Suns
29 - Fremont, CA at Jade Cathay with Later Alligator, Yipee!
30 - Los Angeles, CA at the Smell wit Stereobliss (album release)
31 - San Diego, CA at 61st House Ever Built with Pet, Limping

September

2 - Ventura, CA
3 - Santa Cruz, CA at SubRosa with cavespeak, RIP Dante
4 - Sparks, NV at Pizzava with Serendipity, Rat Patrol
5 - Corvallis, OR at Hell

PREMIERE | Mini Golf Water Feature, "Dirt Eater"