‘Everyone needs a place to go, capsized lives sink to depths unknown, drones circle above while flesh and homes turn to ashes below, the watchers’ eyes remain stoic and cold’ (Late Stage Harm Reduction)

During the bloom of melodic hardcore that shaped much of the US scene in the noughties, there was perhaps one band above all who defined this period for me – Rhode Island’s Verse.  Releasing four albums across Rivalry and Bridge Nine, of which perhaps 2006’s From Anger And Rage was the definitive release, they captured all of the key elements that characterised that particular era – a re-engagement with the musical and political roots of US hardcore, while still calling upon more contemporary metallic influences.

And as Love Letter’s debut album, Everyone Wants Something Beautiful, develops you can’t but help draw comparisons with Verse.  This is not simply due to their powerfully distinctive shared vocalist, Quinn Murphy, but the arrangement of the songs itself.  Hardcore can be forged in many different ways, from the distorted low-end driven to the unbridled guitar barrage.  But Love Letter, as with Verse, craft their songs with the clear intent of pushing the vocals to absolute front and centre.  And this is a weight that Murphy has always proved very adept at carrying.  We live in an age of manufactured, synthetic outrage, which is used to distort, rather than inform, debate.  Yet Murphy serves as the antidote to this – their fiercely rhythmic vocals burn with a palpable, heartfelt sincerity and seethe with an unvarnished rage at the inequities that define our society.

But this is no one person show.  The balance of the band comprises former members of Defeater and Death Of A Nation (including Jay Maas on guitar), and they unleash a furious yet nuanced onslaught.  The cleaner than, perhaps, expected guitars unfurl with a gleaming fluidity, while slab-like eruptions of metallic fury are entwined with bleakly dark melodies and passages of reflective, at times almost post-metal tinged, introspection.  A fluently supple rhythm section expertly harnesses these oscillating dynamics and forms a lock-step partnership with Murphy’s vocals, while inventively layered backing vocals and occasional flares of electronic dissonance add further texture.  Stand out moments are myriad from the cathartically surging Wellness Checks And Dear Friends to the haunting spoken word of Settlements, from the searing Meds And Taxes to the swirling, bristling Late Stage Harm Reduction.

The causes and manifestations of social and economic inequality form the album’s coruscating lyrical core as does a cry for us to recognise the human needs that we all share.  Misanthropic Holiday Or Vacation examines the devastating role of ‘Big Pharma’ in US society (‘Tailored pharmaceutical fits to suit you, until the side effects rip you apart at the seams’), before Popular Memes delves into the twisted logic of the alt-right (‘You conquer and divide to expand the grift – sleep well’), and Unhousing Projects explores the human costs and slow violence of homelessness and the relentless financialisation of housing (‘Eviction sealed fates – a new section-eight waitlist dates lock your mind in a prison’).

Meds And Taxes (‘Can’t pull yourself up by bootstraps you’re under heel’) and Late Stage Harm Reduction (‘We work for less in the name of faux progress – we’ve normalised apathy and callousness’) focus on the relentless exploitation of our economic system.  Settlements (‘An impossible world to love’) then details the horrors of illegal land grabs in Palestine and the dehumanising day-to-day realities of a segregated society – which have, of course, subsequently taken an even more horrific turn.

Something beautiful certainly, but equally something deeply sobering.

‘Construimos sus prisiones, capturamos nuestro tiempo. Malgastando nuestra vida, siendo presas de su juego. Educadas y engañadas para aceptar su autoridad, subyugar los cuerpos, apenas poder respirar’ (En Defense Del Ocio Creativo) ‘We build their prisons; we capture our time. Wasting our lives, being prey to their game. Educated and deceived to accept their authority, subjugate our bodies, barely being able to breathe’ (In Defence Of Creative Leisure)

Originally released in 2020, Ningún Muro Consiguió Jamás Contener La Primavera (No Wall Has Ever Gotten To Contain The Spring) is the recently repressed second full-length from Tijuana’s Habak.  Darkly melodic crust defined the band’s 2015 debut.  However, it is the shimmering post-metal woven through Insania that now becomes a much more dominant influence on this hauntingly beautiful follow-up.

The guitars are bright and frequently clean.  The riffs are given time to fully evolve, the melodies the space to conjure their mesmerising power, intertwined on occasion with flourishes of darkly stirring cello.  Distortion lends heft to the searingly cathartic hardcore eruptions, while two instrumental interludes are stripped back to an entrancing, meditative reverie.  The rhythm section strikes a fine balance between the delicate and the destructive, vividly demonstrating the potency of subtlety and precision.  The album’s sweep is an expansive and inherently satisfying one, perhaps, reaching its crescendo on No Acepteramos Con Pasividad El Exterminio Al Que Nos Han Conedo (We will Not Passively Accept The Extermination To Which We Have Been Condemned) and Encierro A Cielo Abierto (Open Air Confinement).

The smouldering instrumentation is ignited by the defiantly roared Spanish vocals and the solemn spoken word invocations that embody the fury that fuels Habak.  La No Violencia Es Un Privilegio (Nonviolence Is A Privilege) confronts patriarchal violence and Encierro A Cielo Abierto the corrosive power of the surveillance state.  Then, Hasta Que Vivir La Pena (Until Living Is Worth It) and En Defense Del Ocio Creativo (In Defence Of Creative Leisure) tackle the stultifying, dehumanising controls of our economic system.

‘When the fruits of labor have been drained, to the bone, devotion hangs on, swaying from the rope’ (Devotion)

As his track record of solo projects exploring the more saturnine recesses of post-punk bears testament to, Reuben Sawyer likes to work alone.  Primary Instinct is the second full-length of his current project, Human Trophy.

Fuzz drenched rhythm guitar fuels the metallic-tinged death rock that revels in its own viscous desolation.  The gloom is pierced by the bracingly dissonant lead guitar as it weaves its entrancing, melancholic spell.  Meanwhile, the fluid, deftly understated rhythm section delivers a limber, driving momentum and, perhaps, a more warmly organic underpinning than the icily mechanical beats of 2021’s debut, Corpse Dream.

Sawyer’s darkly resonant, baritone vocals emerge as an unwavering monochrome incantation, skilfully accented with flourishes of gothic theatre, saturated in despair.  Bleakly lyrical meditations on isolation and mortality are draped in the spectral imagery of faith and myth.  The funereal atmosphere is evoked with particular intensity by the hauntingly contagious Tears Of Eros, the sombre discordance of The Cabin, and the hypnotically coiling Bright Like Perspex.

‘Paranoid circus machine, maintain control through monotony, smiling ear to ear, blissful in your deceit, mass psychosis, menticide’ (En Mass)

Tallahassee’s Armor are back with a new six-track 12-inch, having caused quite the stir with their debut EP, Some Kind Of War, back in 2019.  The kernel of the band’s sound continues to be rooted in d-beat.  This is then overlain with a more fuzzed out groove that is in turn melded with stomping start-stop dynamics, and a healthy penchant for breakdowns of the most bruising hue.

Burly, guttural vocals explore themes of the surveillance state (En Mass), the dehumanising repercussions of militarisation (Fodder and Proper Treatment), and our ability to build our own self-imposed constraints (Freedom and Unlucky).  Stand out moments are, perhaps, the innately swaggering Fodder, and the more expansive yet still utterly bludgeoning closer, Proper Treatment.

‘Camina la muerte entre el silencio, de cadáveres que la patria reclama, no hay funerales los muertos no entierran, y su libertad se tiñe de sangre’ (Silencio Sepulchral) ‘Death walks among the silence, of corpses that the homeland claims, there are no funerals, the dead are not buried, and their freedom is stained with blood’ (Deathly Silence)

Alambrada unleash another rampant slab of hardcore punk from Bogota.  Featuring members of Ataque Zero and Muro, Ríos De Sangre (Rivers Of Blood) is the band’s full-length debut and follow up to 2021’s Muerte Preventiva (Preventive Death) EP.  And it is one of absolute whirlwind intensity and an unhinged, fiercely off-kilter energy.

The constants are riffs that are unremittingly fast and Spanish vocals that are utterly feral, but otherwise this is an album that constantly writhes in unexpected directions through a battery of savage tempo changes and dense, unexpected rhythmic patterns.  The lead guitar throws in some particularly flamboyant flourishes, frantically inventive, vibrantly melodic, at times, almost jazz tinged.

The murderous legacy of the narcotics war and extrajudicial violence that continue to scar Colombia are the focal point for tracks, such as Marco Estado (Narco State), the title track, and Silencio Sepulcral (Deathly Silence).  The latter two are particular stand outs.  Meanwhile, the scapegoating of migrant communities and the consequences US foreign policy in Latin America are confronted on Primer Mondo (First World) and U.S. respectively.

‘All our rights are being pulled back, with no end in sight, the wall between church and state, keeps on growing thinner and thinner’ (No Place Here)

Hailing From Virgina Beach, Bato return with their debut full-length and follow-up to 2019’s Ravages Of Time EP.  The band’s base template of blisteringly fast, densely precise hardcore – which draws inspiration primarily from 1980s’ US hardcore, while also being laced through with a discernible mid-2000s’ youth crew spicing – remains firmly in place.

The riffs are fired off with a relentless intensity, an equally remorseless rhythm section ensuring that everything remains locked-in tight.  Bato’s grip on the pacing dynamics is resolute yet fluid.  Each riff is given just enough time to land its hook before barrelling off in a fresh direction, with deft tempo changes, flaring solos, and subtle instrumental accents ensuring that the energy levels never diminish.  The band’s fiercely honed songwriting is, arguably, best captured by the ferocious opener Legacy, the mid-paced fury of No Place Here, and the seething Pecking Order.

The vigorous, urgent vocals are the perfect fit as they explore the social malaise gripping US society from economic inequality (Legacy, Useless Debt, and S.O.S) to religious extremism (No Place Here), and from the insidious impacts of social media (Echo Chamber and Model Life) to the hollowing out of democracy (Milk).

‘Rakovi boce i morske ljage, i puno puno po kamenu smeča, na grobu mome umjesto svijeća, florescentna plastika držat će stražu. More zna svu našu bol’ (Gradski Cvjetovi) ‘Bottle crabs and sea urchins, and lots and lots of trash on the stone, on my grave instead of candles, fluorescent plastic will keep watch. The sea knows all our pain’ (City Flowers)

How to make a great record in three steps. One – lay down a limber rhythm that bounces with an insidious danceability.  Two – overlay these crisply pounding beats with beautifully crystalline guitars that brim with an entrancing, infectious melancholy.  Three – inject semi-shouted anarcho-punk vocals that bristle with a defiant vitality and, when required, a gratifyingly knowing sneer.  You’ll be bellowing along in no time, whether you know Croatian or not.

Welcome to the world of Zadar’s Mižerija (Misery).  I must admit that I missed this release first time round, but thankfully Doomtown Records have had the eminent good sense to run a second press.  The band’s name may belie their boisterous sonic energies but it is rather more in tune with the darkly poetic lyrics as they tackle themes of loneliness, the patriarchy, and environmental degradation.

There is almost a brittleness to each of the five tracks, yet the sheer velocity of the band’s delivery ensures that everything holds together with a rollicking vigour.  From the utterly raucous opening two tracks Izolacija (Isolation) and Lanci (Chains), the flipside takes a rather more ominous turn on Crni Grad (The Black City) and Gradski Cvjetovi (City Flowers), before the unhinged, noise infused closer, Kraj (The End).

‘Media surveillance corporations, feeding off our unique selves, commodify our interests and experiences, broken mirrors sell us back our dreams’ (Biometricks)

State Manufactured Terror’s debut EP instantly transports you back to the mid-to-late 1980s when crust punk and metal were first being brutally fused together.  The earliest iterations of Bolt Thrower and Napalm Death come most readily to mind, injected, perhaps, with a dash of Nausea’s hardcore swagger.

The New York band’s delivery is undeniably raw.  Individual instruments merge into a frenzied blur.  Bulldozer riffs and visceral solos occasionally flare, alongside the rasping anarcho-punk leaning vocals, amid the discordant chaos.  Yet there is an organic looseness that lends the onslaught an almost live dynamic that proves particularly vivid on Biometricks and Gentrification Displacement Machine.  The band’s politics are similarly uncompromising with surveillance capitalism, urban dispossession courtesy of real estate capital, and the recent horrors in the Middle East all firmly in focus.

‘Se tranzan concienas, se pactan sobornost, las horas contadas, a quien obstaculiza el progreso voraz’ (Cultura Mercenaria) ‘Consciences are compromised, bribes are agreed upon, the hours are numbered, for those who hinder voracious progress’ (Mercenary Culture)

Muro return with their much anticipated third full-length, and follow-up to 2020’s Pacificar, and it has most certainly been worth the wait.  The Bogota band’s fierce sonic impact is, as ever, shaped by two distinct qualities.  Firstly, their innate ability to weave disparate influences – from Latin American to Italian traditions by way of the anthemic peaks of Burning Spirits Japanese hardcore – into a cohesive whole.  And, secondly, their rare capacity to inject their recorded output with the utterly explosive, chaotic fervour of their live show, a skill that has eluded many fine bands.

And Nuevo Dogma (New Dogma) bears testament to this prowess.  The recording itself is unashamedly raw and yet the band’s assured command of melody, as well as some seriously mean solo work, still cuts through the frantically suffocating atmosphere with invigorating verve, alongside the rabid Spanish vocals.  Meanwhile, the rhythm section is utterly propulsive and provides remorseless traction for the wider onslaught.  Stand-out tracks come thick and fast, but, for me at least, Fosas (Pits), Destierro (Exile) and Frustación Fabricada (Manufactured Frustration) capture Muro at their most instinctual – the relentless push-pull between dissonance and melody, the primal and the progressive.

However, Muro’s influence is not confined to their musical virtuosity.  Perhaps, even more crucially, it is reflected in both the DIY ethos and political engagement that imbues both the creation and distribution of the album, as well as its philosophical core.  Taking the physical record itself, it is only available in analogue form and the 1,000 run press has been drawn, printed, folded, and glued by the band themselves.  As well as the album’s stunning artwork (there are four separate covers of which we have two, a black one and white one), each copy includes three posters and a Spanish language fanzine.  The record has then been distributed on behalf of the band’s own label, Fuerza Ingobernable (Ungovernable Force), by a network of like-minded labels.

Now, to the ideas that shape the record, and the accompanying fanzine provides essential context to the album.  The endemic violence and accompanying neoliberal economic turn that have shaped Colombia’s recent history, and their clear parallels elsewhere, provide Muro’s lyrical inspiration.  The album’s narrative examines how perpetual notions of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ are deployed to support increasingly authoritarian controls and economic exploitation.  Covering how this exploitation fuels ever greater socio-economic inequality that in turns feeds the explosion in populist sentiment and the scapegoating of already marginalised communities.

It is easy to be overwhelmed with frustration and an acceptance that there is no other way.  To their credit, the band passionately sketch out their own alternative, the Nuevo Dogma of the album title.  A way of living that seeks to undermine the strictures of capitalism, and that is rooted in community collaboration, mutual aid, and autonomous networks to resist commodification and forge an alternative future.  An everyday anarchy – the very principles that shaped the making of this record.

‘Is it a dream or just an illusion? Engulfed by the fire and flames, Fallen dogs assail their masters, The end comes as foretold’ (The Sickening Fear)

New York’s Savage Pleasure have arrived, and their self-titled debut LP is an impressively realised one.  By fusing crust-fuelled 1980s’ UK anarcho-punk with the primordial rawness of first wave death metal, the band have honed a battery of visceral ferocity.  Eschewing grandstand moments, it is built through relentlessly skilful layering and fiercely crafted dynamics to create an utterly all-enveloping sense of the darkness descending.

Indeed, it is an album steeped in a darkly contagious sense of drama.  The bleakly resonant bass and primitive-leaning drums provide a rock-solid base.  The harshly dissonant rhythm guitars unleash swells of bruising, muscular riffage, with particular savagery on The Sickening Fear and The Glorious Descent.  Meanwhile, infectiously melancholic leads are braided throughout the onslaught, most notably, perhaps, on The Blistering Plague.

Similarly, the coarse, guttural vocals roar their apocalyptic narrative with an unexpected dexterity, whether in the forlorn cry at the pounding climax of The Sentry or the snarled eruption during the groove laden The Reaper’s Scythe. Further texture is introduced through the dungeon synth and choral vocal intertwined intro track, The Shimmering Dark, and the sombre acoustic guitar and haunting spoken word laced through the crushing closer, Chasms Of Distant Dreams.  A thoroughly savage pleasure indeed.

‘The system works for one not three, An end in sight, I cannot see…Manufactured disparity, You are you, And I’m not me’ (Blood Soaked System)

Following last year’s fierce debut EP, Can You See The Future?, Phoenix’s Yellowcake are back with another six tracks of rampant d-beat and, if anything, the intensity has been dialled up yet another notch.  The guitars continue to balance cleaner, thashier riffs with discordant wall of noise eruptions and squalling solos, while the relentless, cymbal awash drums yield moments of satisfying deftness amid the wider onslaught.  Rasping, delay saturated vocals explore themes of war, entrenched privilege, and unfolding environmental catastrophe with a desperate urgency.  Stand-out moments include the absolutely searing Maelstrom, the swaggering Blood Soaked System, and the unhinged When Night Comes.

‘Revenir de loin, Lumière au bout du chemin, Je fais le point, Sans savoir où va demain, Choper un train avec un sourire en coin’ (Tomber De Haut) ‘Coming back from far away, Light at the end of the road, I take stock, Without knowing where tomorrow is going, Catching a train with a wry smile’ (Fall From A Height)

Brussels trio, Cœur À L’Index (Heart To Index), make their vinyl debut on Adieu Minette (Goodbye Minette) with a vibrant power pop album that calls in equal measure on influences from 1960s’ pop and 1970s’ punk.  The jauntily infectious French language vocals are crystal clear, the rhythm section crisply punchy, and the guitar bright and clean with a hint of jangle as it teases out gently melancholic melodies.

It is, perhaps, though the skilfully crafted backing harmonies that steal the show adding a delightful layer of bittersweet complexity as each track unfolds.  Indeed, they form an important bridge between the breezy yet tightly honed song writing and the rather more disenchanted lyrical tales of stale relationships, controlling partners, and drifting through life, with just the hint of better times to come. Personal favourites are the briskly bouncy Dernier Fois (Last Time) and the catchily sombre Minette.

‘Eine Stadt voller trotz, Eine Stadt voller Tod, Was ist hier korrekt, Das weiß niemand konkret, Neue Hässlichkeit, Neue Freiheit, Neue Sklaverei, In der Nacht Geschrei’ (Trotzstadt) ‘A city full of defiance, A city full of death, What is correct here, Nobody knows for sure, New Ugliness, New Freedom, New Slavery, Screaming in the Night’ (City Of Defiance)

Turn up the volume, clear the sofa, and prepare to move.  Cosey Mueller is back on the turntable, with the follow-up to last year’s Irrational Habits.  And, if anything, the atmosphere of uneasy angst is even more amplified, the promise of the illicit even more pronounced.

The pulsating synths and thumping dance beats combine with tip of the nose quivering intensity.  Haunting melodies lock-in with an utterly possessive synchronicity, reinforced by occasional swells of clean guitar.  Meanwhile, austerely deadpan vocals, alternating as ever between German and English, continue to hone the art of mechanical yet mesmerising repetition as we become entangled in a web of the ambiguous and the unspoken.

Möchtegern (Would Like To) kicks things off perfectly, all pulsing electronics, skittering melodies, and whispered urgings.  Then, the darkly contagious I Am Soft and Trotzstadt weave their insidious spells, before the side closes with the fevered Fremdtraüme (Foreign Dreams).  The potency of the flip side is equally entrancing.  The detached acceptance of the choppy Falsches Ding (Wrong Thing) and the throbbing Imitierte Lust (Imitated Lust) feed into the deeply resonant grooves of the banging In Indifference, before Sugarhoney languidly brings us back to reality.

‘Sentir los latidos, marcaste la senda. Olor a mojado después de la tormenta. El chándal de tactel, rodillas magulladas. Grabando las cintas de Eskorbuto y Barricada’ (Recuerdos) ‘Feeling the heartbeat, you marked the path, Smell of wetness after the storm. The tactel tracksuit, bruised knees, Recording the Eskorbuto and Barricada tapes’ (Memories)

Hailing from Zaragoza, Venganza have been active since 2012 and Damnatio Memoriae (Condemnation Of Memory) is their second full-length and follow-up to the 2021 EP, La Fiera (The Beast).  Bristling hardcore is fused with a street punk rawness and riven through with a deep-seated, fuzzed yet sinuous melodicism.  This potent blend comes together with particular ferocity on the stirring Recuerdos and the searing Herederx De La Empresa (Heir Of The Company).

The album’s title draws on the Roman practise of erasing from the public record anyone who was seen to have been an enemy of the people.  The concept has since come to be understood as a wider, systematic erasure of memory by the state of those that oppose it, sanctions that seek to obscure and distort history.  The artwork speaks to resisting this process with imagery drawn from their city’s history – anarchist activists, industrial conflicts, and notorious civil war prisons.

Lyrically, bar the state sanctioned violence of El Hedor Es Tu Divisa (The Stench Is Your Currency), the focus of the snarled Spanish vocals is on more contemporary social conflicts.  Vida-Trabajo (Life-Work) and Herederx De La Empresa explore how we succumb to the pressures of consumerism, while Facta Non Verba (Deeds Not Words) and Anarcomodernxs take aim at empty gesture politics.  The album closes with a rousing cover of Hasta El Fin (Until The End) by 1980s’ Basque punks, R.I.P.

‘If you’re not enraged, You should dig some more, Never take for granted what people fought for years before, Death is certain, life is not’ (Harrowing Times)

Chain Cult will always hold something of a special place in my heart, playing as they did the first live show that I saw coming out of the various Covid lockdowns, with Subdued and The Annihilated at the Moth Club in April 2022.  Those periods of lockdown now seem a memory more distant than the actual passage of time should allow.  But what does remain very fresh in my mind is the joy of returning to live music – the pleasures of communal participation and the sheer sensory vitality that had been so missed.  And the Athens trio were a perfect fit for such a return, their darkly evocative post-punk inducing a sense of melancholic trepidation and defiant hope in equal measure.

Harm Reduction is the band’s second full-length, following on from 2019’s Shallow Grave, and the band continue to conjure tightly honed, mournfully euphoric anthems.  The key to the band’s sound has always been its surging synchronicity.  The powerfully sonorous rhythm section provides the lock-step groundwork for the smouldering guitar, while passionately strident vocals dissect the bleakness of our current predicament and, without collective action, even more desolate future. The album’s immersive virtues are, perhaps, perfectly encapsulated by the utterly infectious opener What We Leave Behind and the urgent forewarnings of Harrowing Times.

‘On the stage of the obscene, inhumanity is sold with ease, culture stripped and disembowelled, turned to vacant disease, capital eats all, while we sit at this lifeless feast’ (Captive […In The Mutilated Vista])

Over the past decade, Toronto’s S.H.I.T. have released a slew of EPs and now return with their second full-length, For A Better World.  As ever, their sound revolves around wave upon wave of relentless riffage that is as remorseless as it is infectiously dissonant.  A satisfyingly elastic rhythm section is the perfect complement as are the utterly venomous vocals, less saturated in effects than on earlier releases, and dripping with an undisguised contempt for our failure to tackle our corroding democracy, degrading environment, and militarised violence.

Amid such an onslaught, it is the textural accents that provide invaluable mooring points – from the discordant electronic flares throughout Corporate Funded Killing Technology to the soaring melodic guitar lead on Terminal Democracy, and from the relentless, roiling drums of Imminent Destruction to the wailing, anguished climax of Captive (…In The Mutilated Vista).  An album of unwavering intensity, unremitting hostility.

Freak Genes return with their sixth album, Delirik, as surging synths and agitated, percussive electronics conjure a mercurial reverie, equal parts anguish and euphoria, exploring the emerging phases of grief.

Comprising English duo Charlie Murphy and Andrew Anderson, the band’s last album, 2022’s Hologram, was heavily influenced by the death of Murphy’s mum.  Delirik, a term that speaks to a form of emotional delirium, builds on this theme as it maps the often disorientating, unsettling evolution of grief once the immediate shock has subsided.

And it is this sense of feverish, oscillating disorientation that Delirik so expertly evokes.  Beneath the brightly futuristic sheen seethes ominously dystopian synth punk that writhes and mutates in unexpected directions, the end destination rarely what might have at first been anticipated.  Waves of melancholic melody, darkly enticing choruses, and eruptions of thumping dance beats propel this restless, relentless shape shifting.  Meanwhile, strident semi-shouted vocals, which also segue into passages of more reserved introspection, inject a sense of defiant hope to pierce the shroud of loss and remembrance.

The very morphology of Delirik seems to, at least partly, reconstitute itself on each visit.  Differing elements come to the fore, the overarching atmosphere unchanged yet its underlying dynamics constantly reformulating.  From the contagiously pounding Deam Night to the coldly entrancing Closer, and from the darkly shuddering Head Of The Snake to the languorously infectious It Can’t Be True, it is quite the trip.

‘Oh god, what’s going on?  I’m digging the bass line of “Annie Waits” from two double oh one, I guess its murder time’ (Look Out World [I’m Eatin’ Arby’s])

Punk should be fast and fun.  So, remains the defining mantra of Citric Dummies as they return with a 7-inch follow-up to last year’s Zen And The Arcade Of Beating Your Ass full-length.  Rapid-fire melodic punk, with a dash of hardcore bristle, and a slug of rock’n’roll swagger is the straight ahead, but thoroughly well executed, order of the day.

Similarly, the Minneapolis band’s lyrical focus is a delicious fusion of the satirical and the ridiculous.  The exact balance of which probably depends on the ears of the listener.  These four tracks span tales of being locked in parking garages (unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the EP’s title and boasting the immortal line ‘I’m not a car – I’m a man’) and driving cars that should be on the scrapheap, to odes to the dubious pleasures of eating fast food while listening to Ben Folds Five – my favourite track, Look Out World (I’m Eatin’ Arby’s) – and to the conviction that punk should always be played fast.

Outsider is the debut album from Minneapolis’ Bermuda Squares, an unequivocal lesson in delivering no-nonsense punk with melodic verve and exuberant sincerity.

Bermuda Squares feature a veritable roll call of the Minneapolis punk fraternity including members of Citric Dummies, Green/Blue, and Retainers.  And it will come as no surprise that the band call heartily upon this pedigree.  This is punk channelled through its core fundamentals, enriched by flourishes of carefully crafted invention – tightly honed two-minute eruptions that meld a Midwest heart with Southern California licks, a raw garage energy with contagiously layered pop harmonies.

The album’s driving force lies in its guitars – warmly fuzzed, they unfurl wave upon wave of buzzsaw riffs, fizzing with melody and rearing into fiery solos.  Meanwhile, the spiky vocals evoke wryly observed tales of everyday life’s fluctuating fortunes, from the rampaging Boring and Mortality to the more expansive Basement (Funbois) with its distinctive, almost country-tinged, twang.

‘A woman at the window, Beating her head against the glass, Yellow light casting shadows, Translucent to crimson red, Making cracks – crying out for a savior’ (Bird To Woman)

Hailing from Cincinnati, and featuring Cole Gilfilen of Corker and The Drin, Hopscotch Fever is the debut album from Artificial Go.  And while, initially, the palette can strike as quite spartan, it gradually reveals itself to be a delightfully rich melding of influences.  The bright, scratchy guitars and lock-step rhythm section speak to the band’s garage punk base that is then accented with flourishes of post-punk angularity and a decidedly off-kilter pop sensibility.

Angie Willcutt’s arresting vocals add a further intriguing dimension as they sweep seamlessly from the kookily detached to the austerely melodic.  And with a keen eye for the absurd, the band draw us into a surreally evoked tableau that explores the artificial expectations and pressures that colour and distort our lives.  Highlights range from the tautly catchy On Off and the delightfully unhinged Artificial Go to, perhaps, my personal stand out, the darkly infectious closer Bird To Woman.