Johannesburg Garage Punks NECKLACE Announce Debut LP Manual Breather on Slovenly Recordings
New Album Manual Breather Out November 13, 2026

Photo Credit: Ilze Mari Wessels
**Stream LP**

Johannesburg’s NECKLACE make their Slovenly Recordings debut with Manual Breather, a six-song LP arriving November 13, 2026. Raw, repetitive, wired and strangely joyful, the record pulls from the primitive throb of Suicide, the damaged rock and roll of The Stooges and the narcotic cool of The Velvet Underground without sounding like a band trying to recreate somebody else’s New York. This comes from somewhere else entirely. Johannesburg is a city built on what was pulled from underneath it. Gold made the place, mine dumps still rise above parts of the skyline, and the underground keeps finding its own rooms between Soweto, Braamfontein, Melville and the sprawling city in between. Punk shows collide with skate culture, graffiti, zines and backyard DIY. Concrete holds the day’s heat. Highveld dust hangs in the dry-season air before summer storms come down hard and fast. NECKLACE belong to that Johannesburg, not as scenery or some exotic footnote, but as four people making loud, immediate music inside a city where contradiction is part of the daily weather.

That world is also how Slovenly found them. In August 2025, the label caught NECKLACE playing alongside their friends Twenty One Children and Club Valley at Thula’s Purple House in Soweto, part of a DIY benefit for Hope for the Hopeless Children’s Home. It was the kind of show where the distance between band and room effectively disappears. Slovenly saw four people onstage throwing joy, rage, energy and abandon back and forth and asked them to send some recordings. Those recordings became Manual Breather.

Produced by Lucas Cowling at Substation Studios, Manual Breather finds Dino Mastropaolo, Alberto Vasconcelos, Kate Gannaway and Dean Hibbert trading instruments and vocal duties across six tracks. Rather than sticking to fixed roles, the four members shift between guitars, bass, drums and the microphone, giving the record a collective, restless character. Across “Stab,” “Angel Says,” “Idol,” “Manual Breather,” “Trance” and “We Buy Cars,” NECKLACE work with repetition, abrasion and momentum rather than excess. The guitars scrape and jab. Rhythms lock into place and stay there long enough to become hypnotic. Vocals arrive with the cool remove of post-punk one moment and the threat of a garage band coming apart in the room the next. The Suicide influence makes sense in the repetition and tension, while The Stooges and Velvet Underground surface in the record’s instinct for taking something simple, dirtying it up and refusing to let go.

But Manual Breather isn’t a record that feels particularly interested in behaving like a museum piece. NECKLACE are part of a young Johannesburg underground that is happening now. Twenty One Children have already pointed toward them as one of the South African bands worth paying attention to, and NECKLACE have continued turning up across the same network of punk shows, skate events and DIY spaces connecting Soweto with the inner city. At Concrete Culture in Braamfontein this year, bands shared the day with skateboarding, graffiti, zines, art and Jozi skate films. It is less a neatly defined “scene” than a bunch of overlapping subcultures finding one another and making their own infrastructure.

That makes Slovenly a pretty natural home, and the relationship is already carrying NECKLACE well beyond Johannesburg. This December, the band heads to Brazil for a Slovenly-backed run in support of Manual Breather, with shows beginning December 2 in São Paulo before stops in Mogi das Cruzes and Campinas, a December 12 appearance at Mandinga Fest in São Paulo, and a December 13 show in Santo André. The tour also marks Slovenly’s return to Brazil after roughly a decade away and the beginning of a new South Africa-to-Brazil connection for the label, with Twenty One Children set to follow in May 2027. For South African bands facing expensive and complicated visa barriers across much of the touring world, Brazil offers something refreshingly straightforward: a place they can actually go play.

For NECKLACE, the introduction is simpler. Six songs. Johannesburg. A room in Soweto loud enough to get Slovenly’s attention. A Brazilian tour waiting on the other side. A band that sounds like it has figured out exactly how much it needs and is suspicious of anything more. Manual Breather is out November 13, 2026 on Slovenly Recordings.

NECKLACE | BRAZIL TOUR 2026

Johannesburg Garage Punks NECKLACE Announce Debut LP Manual Breather