It’s not goodbye, it’s see you later
Two years ago we saw a lot of our favorite DIY artists giving everything to make music and get it out to the world, at the time, we were in a position to help. We are believers in the life philosophy of “First you learn, then you earn, then you return.”
After successful personal careers creating art and entertainment in games, music, film, and print over the last 25 years. We had the ability to finally return to the community that created us.
My wife, Sam, and I decided to start a DIY label. We took zero outside investment, we asked 0% of the money back from our artists. We paid for merch, vinyl, studio time, van repairs, rentals, hotels, ubers, purchased equipment and gear and anything else our bands required to continue to write, record, distribute, and tour to your nearest city to play live. We sponsored DIY festivals across the country (Excellency Fest, Gnargaritaville) and even acquired other DIY labels that hit hard time to try to cover refunds for lost pre-orders from those labels.
Everything we did was at ZERO personal gain. We never took money out of PNWK, we only put money in because we were not a business. We are a not-for-profit collection of two people who love music and wanted to give back. We will never regret this.
Sadly though, as our industry (video game development) is going through an unprecedented change, both Sam and I have been left unemployed (multiple times throughout the year). It’s a hard time for a lot of people, us included. Therefore our ability to giveaway money to support the arts has disappeared. Our desire and intentions remain the same, and as soon as we’ve built up our personal finances again, we’ll be back to support more bands and more releases. In the meantime however, we have to focus on our children’s needs (food, shelter, healthcare) and can’t provide anymore funding to PNWK.
We are incredibly proud of the bands we’ve supported and the releases we’ve managed to produce in this very short amount of time. Today on X, a member of the band Summerbruise called our generosity a “waste (of) money on dumb shit” and we adamently disagree with that opinion. We believe that supporting independent music and artists is the most worthwhile use of money.
Without it, we wouldn’t have these incredible albums:
Support DIY music, support DIY bands, Support DIY venues, Support DIY labels.
All we have is each other, please be kind and helpful whenever possible.
We love you, we appreciate all the support we’ve been shown over the last very intense years, and we hope to be back as soon as possible.
Love,
Robert and Sam Bowling (PNWK Records)
All vinyl releases will remain on sale until sold out at www.pnwk.shop - The new FinalBossFight! release will be added as soon as production is finished. We have several new digital releases already set to release and several big announcements and tours still happening through 2026 that are already planned and paid for. 