The Counterforce
Hardcore Punk Underground
Introducing MRR Reviews Digest Zines

Introducing MRR Reviews Digest Zines

by Martin Force
published on 2025-2-2
tags: Articles

January 2025 marked Maximum Rocknroll's 500th "Issue". The print run of MRR ended with Issue #432 in May 2019, but online "Issues" are still published on the Maximum Rocknroll website. Every months-worth of reviews are still batched together on the site and given an issue number. Print issues have also had all their reviews digitized on the site and organized by issue. If you didn't know, you should check out their archive of reviews!

I've been working on this quietly for a few months, but in honor of MRR #500, I'm sharing it more broadly. Every month I convert MRR's latest digital "Issue" or reviews into a printable PDF zine in the classic folded 8.5 x 11 format: something anyone can print at home. I want to make these reviews more accessible and contribute to more zines at shows. These PDFs are added to our digital zine distro. Here's the printable PDF for MRR Reviews #500!

I encourage you to print them out and table them at shows PYWC in your area. If instead you want to read these reviews online, just check out Issue #500 on the MRR website. MRR shitworkers are regularly putting up new quality reviews!

There are also PDFs for the last few issues, as well as Issue #1 (for fun):

I'll continue making these every month and adding them to the distro. There are also print issues of The Counterforce and other printable zines friends have submitted.

Did you get permission?

No! MRR was always published with a pretty clear "republish anything here anywhere as long as it's not-for-profit" policy, and I'm just assuming that is still in effect in their post-print era. I did contact them to check in when cooking up this scheme, but never heard back! I assume they are drowning in e-mails with links to terrible demos on Bandcamp and Spotify. If you write reviews for MRR, or otherwise are involved with the MRR website and have thoughts on this project, please get in touch!

How are these made?

I made a Python script to pull a digital issue off the MRR website and organize the reviews. Then I use a typst script to generate a PDF. The last step is to make an imposed version for printing. It takes me about 10 minutes!

It's not a beautifully laid out print magazine like the old MRR. It's just a zine like you find on a zine table at any show. It's easy for me to make a new one every month, and accessible for anyone with a printer or a copy scam to print. I hope this will help get these reviews into more hands, and encourage more people to distro zines at shows. Reading reviews online is fine, but it's definitely different when you can pick up a paper zine and circle reviews of releases you want to check out later.

If you have other punk/hardcore/DIY zines that you want to contribute to our digital zine distro, please submit: anything recent and in a printable format that you are down with people printing and distributing on a not-for-profit basis. Let's make it easy for punks everywhere to start up a local zine distro. Print It Yourself!