Third Man to Issue Unreleased Monks Songs

As if life couldn’t get any weirder, five previously unreleased tracks by The Monks are being issued as Hamburg Recordings 1967 by the fine folks at Third Man Records on June 23rd.

The opening track on the EP, “I’m Watching You,” was recorded during the same late February, 1967 studio session that resulted in the band’s final single, “Love Can Tame the Wild” b/w “He Went Down to the Sea.” The remaining four songs were recorded after hours in Hamburg’s Top Ten Club later that year, just prior to the group’s breakup.

The Monks were an odd, short-lived outfit formed by five American G.I.’s stationed in Germany in the mid 1960s, bringing an anything-goes avant-garde edge to psychedelic garage rock. Their notoriety has expanded in the decades since, as their original records have been discovered and blabbered about by collectors and garage rock enthusiasts.