Ernest Jenning Record Co.

Savak

SAVAK has always sounded like a band with one foot in the record store and the other out the door. Formed in Brooklyn in 2015 by Sohrab Habibion (Obits, Edsel) and Michael Jaworski (The Cops, Virgin Islands), the NYC post-punk outfit has spent the past decade turning a lifetime of underground-rock knowledge into something restless, sharp, melodic, and gloriously hard to pin down. Across seven albums, an EP, singles, and countless shows, SAVAK has developed a sound where wiry guitars, churning rhythms, stray horns and keyboards, psychedelic detours, and impossible-to-shake hooks collide.

Habibion and Jaworski split songwriting and lead vocals, giving SAVAK's music a built-in tension and conversational quality: two distinct voices, two guitarists, two sets of influences, constantly pushing and pulling against each other. Their songs can be lean and punchy one minute, sprawling and strange the next, with traces of ’60s garage, ’70s punk and pub rock, ’80s post-punk and American underground music, psychedelia, and sounds picked up from far beyond the usual Anglo-American rock axis. The records are packed with details, but never at the expense of momentum. SAVAK makes music that rewards close listening while still demanding to be played loud.

That sense of motion is baked into the band's history. Since releasing its debut, Best of Luck in Future Endeavors, in 2016, SAVAK has followed its own crooked trajectory through Cut-Ups (2017), Beg Your Pardon (2018), Rotting Teeth in the Horse’s Mouth (2020), Human Error / Human Delight (2022), Flavors of Paradise (2024), and SQUAWK! (2025), its seventh album. Along the way, the band's Peculiar Works label has become a home for its music and its particular DIY approach to making, releasing, and keeping records in circulation.

Now, on October 23, SAVAK looks back at the first ten years with Door Deals And Debt: An Essential Collection From The First 10 Years, released by Peculiar Works in conjunction with Ernest Jenning Record Co. More than a greatest-hits exercise, the collection offers a guided tour through a catalog built on curiosity, collaboration, and an almost pathological resistance to standing still. It takes in the sharp corners, melodic rushes, weird left turns, and stubbornly catchy songs that have defined SAVAK since day one.

Ten years on, SAVAK still sounds like itself—but “itself” is a moving target. A band made up of people who have been around the underground-rock block more than once, SAVAK doesn't trade in nostalgia so much as accumulated experience: every record is another opportunity to rearrange the pieces, follow a good riff somewhere unexpected, and make a little more noise before the night is over.