Bleached Cross and The True Faith are both bands that relish the darker shades of post-punk.  And while their shared inspirations provide this split full-length with an undeniable sonic unity, their distinctive interpretations also ensure a thoroughly satisfying contrast.

‘You’ll carry these chains, As the devil leads you down into the flames, You’ll carry these chains, Forged in your life, Burning your flesh, Now there’s no one left to blame’ (Grief’s Eternal Wound, Bleached Cross)

Bleached Cross, a five-piece that features all three members of Frail Body, hail from Chicago and Columns Of Impenetrable Light represents the follow-up to their 2022 self-titled debut.  Their sound emerges from an icy maelstrom of dark wave and post-punk, darkly pulsing synths intertwined with bleakly soaring guitar and powerfully melodic vocals.  A further intriguing dimension is introduced as the band call upon their pedigree to introduce elements more readily associated with heavier music to the mix, from industrial fuelled percussion to blackened backing vocals, a blend that proves impressively organic.

The band themselves have adopted the tag oppressive post-punk, which certainly captures the haunting claustrophobia that permeates their music.  Yet at the same time there is an anthemic quality – the chorus to the brilliant opening track Grief’s Eternal Wound is quite simply absolutely banging – that suggests a rich pop sensibility nestling amongst the darker inspirations.  Lyrically, there is no doubting its relevance as their four tracks, from the sombrely infectious Rain Of Tears (‘Numbness takes hold of me, Everywhere I go you should be’) to the juddering sorrow of Litany (‘I try to fall asleep, but I’m punished by memories of your pale eyes’), evocatively explore the evolving stages of grief.

‘Dreams of virtue enter slow decline, when we justify the means, broken pictures left inside our mind, one hand takes while one receives’ (The Means, The True Faith)

The flipside sees Boston’s The True Faith assuredly take the reins.  With three full-lengths already under their belt, including last year’s Go To Ground, the band call on a more restrained, more sparingly applied palette to conjure a darkly alluring, gothically charged atmosphere.

The strident yet melancholy imbued vocals poignantly render mournfully allusive imagery.  Meanwhile, infectious crystalline guitars and throbbingly resonant bass lines are intertwined with swells of arctic synth and pounding drums, most notably, perhaps, on the urgent opener What If (I Could Tell You) and the eerily enticing Life Awaits Us.

‘So paint me black and blue, until I disappear, parade your passion, a romance dressed in violence, is this what love is?’ (Loveless)

Blind Girls hail from Australia’s Gold Coast but any images of sun kissed beaches will instantly dissipate the moment the needle drops as this their third album, An Exit Exists, is a lesson in unrelenting savagery.  The band meld together an utterly fierce fusion of screamo and chaotic hardcore influences – conjure, perhaps, a conflation of Botch and You And I – each track honed into a cathartic two-minute eruption.  This economy speaks persuasively to the quality of song writing – there may be no room for self-indulgence but each song writhes with invention and seethes with emotional intensity.

Harsh guitars and discordantly serpentine melodies are underpinned by a furious, blast beat flirting rhythm section, while the feral vocals quite literally drip with a tortured anguish as they delve into darkly personal themes of guilt, rejection, and betrayal.  Memorable moments are myriad from the dissonant metallic eruptions of Loveless to the hauntingly beautiful close to Blemished Memory, and from the squalling fury of Make Me Nothing to the ominous melancholy of Lilac.

‘It all falls from the sky, heaven’s gone, Damned to the wastelands, collateral damage in the kingdom of the sick’ (A Crisis Area Forever)

Duhkha is a concept common to Buddhism and Hinduism that acts as a catch all for any phenomena that innately provokes a feeling of unease.  And it would be no understatement to say that the band fully animate their moniker – their utterly bruising debut album, and follow-up to 2022’s self-titled EP, bristles with a profound and unflinching sense of disquiet.

Hailing from Southern California, the band features members of Dangers, Seizures, and Eighteen Visions, and their sonic foundations are very much those of late 1990s’ metallic hardcore in the vein of Deadguy and Coalesce.  Dense, discordant guitars veer from slabs of staccato fury to dissonant melody, underpinned by a polyrhythmic cyclone of a rhythm section.  Meanwhile, demonically growled vocals weave a desolate, cosmic tinged telling of apocalyptic futures.

The battery is ferociously heavy, the atmosphere unrelentingly oppressive.  Stand-out tracks range from the doom infused Arrows and monolithic rage of Heaven Screen to the brutally crushing A Crisis Area Forever.  The first sustained respite arrives on the album’s more expansive final track, Null, as a rousing valedictory chorus segues into a billowing post-metal climax.

‘You think you’ve felt it all, Can’t get any worse, Trauma fills your bones til you’re laid down in a hearse’ (Funeral March)

Having been active since 2017, Brighton’s Imposter make their vinyl bow on this, their debut full-length, Oblivion Opens.  Drawing in equal measure on the buzzsaw riffage of early 1990s’ European death metal and the swaggering velocity of late 1980s’ New York hardcore, the band have unleashed a visceral realisation of blackened hardcore.  Think, perhaps, of an unholy union of Entombed’s Left Hand Path and Agnostic Front’s One Voice.

That the burly, bulldozer riffs and sinister guttural vocals form the band’s bedrock is unsurprising, but the notably limber rhythm section injects a thoroughly enticing suppleness to the onslaught.  Meanwhile, lyrical themes of depression, addiction, and mortality provide a harrowing accompanying narrative.  Personal highlights include the rampant opener Kings Uncrowned, the stomping title track, and the pulverising finale, Only The Few Remain.

‘Am I a product of my environment? Or is my environment a product of me? I’m a product of the television screen, A self-made American man’ (Self-Made American Man)

Candy Apple’s base recipe of reverb-drenched, shoegaze infused guitar being melded with an unbridled hardcore ferocity has always held an undeniable appeal.  The band’s 2021 debut LP, Sweet Dreams Of Violence, certainly did not disappoint.  Yet, at the same time, it felt like there was significant headroom for the band to still explore and their follow-up 2022’s World For Sale gave notice that Candy Apple, who feature members of fellow Denver outfits Of Feather And Bone and Raw Breed, were going to do exactly that.  And on Comatose, the sense of a band fully hitting their stride, knowing exactly how to harness their influences, is utterly exhilarating.

The key, perhaps, to this fuller realisation has been to elevate the other constituents of their sound without diminishing the power of their dissonant riffage in the slightest.  Front and centre are the lurching, bouncily elastic bass-lines and pounding yet limber drums that fuel the band’s infectiously groove-laden barrage. In fact, a certain swaying looseness, at times an almost rock’n’roll strut, pervades without ever diluting the band’s inherent, primordial heaviness.

Meanwhile, the vocals segue in the blink of an eye from the demonically growled to the ominously whispered by way of the gruffly melodic, perfectly calibrated to the wider onslaught.  Lyrically, the album primarily explores themes of choice (or the lack thereof) through an allegorical lens of bodily function – a sense of being detached and disembodied, unable to shape the world around you.  There is barely a false move, and personal stand-out moments include the bone shuddering swagger of Heaven’s Gate, the sneering Amputate and the absolutely rampaging Self-Made American Man.

‘Process of rebirth, Death blows in reverse, Old wounds finally mend, Despair comes to an end’ (Kill The Pain)

Hailing from Los Angeles, and featuring members of Tozcos and Personal Damage, The Dark return with a full-length follow-up to their 2018 debut EP, Demons.  The band continue to forge an intriguing blend of mid-paced Japanese hardcore and the galloping riffage of early 1980s’ proto-thrash metal and, even at times, the sleazier end of heavy metal from the same period.  And while you might expect this to be overlain with a demonic growl, the vocals are in fact somewhat cleaner, leaning into a gruff, sometimes melodic, occasionally grunted, death rock delivery.

The result is an album of intriguing nuance, a restrained, precisely executed palette that evokes a bleakly uneasy atmosphere.  The first four tracks are, in fact, reworked versions of the same songs from the band’s 2016 demo, and as strong as these are, it is, perhaps, with the newer material that The Dark really begin to flex their muscles from the darkly foreboding riff that defines The Badge And The Gun and the strangely captivating chorus of the scuzzy Heartless, to the surging Nightmare and, my personal favourite, the languidly unfurling Face In The Mirror.

The album’s lyrical focus spans both the directly social in terms of police violence (The Badge And The Gun) and the criminalisation of poverty (Dragged To Hell), and more darkly allusive explorations of the mental attrition of modern life (Cursed) and grief (Sinking Into Madness), before ending on a more optimistic hope for renewal (Kill The Pain).

‘We wanna break our chains, But can’t break away from tearing each other apart, You want me to take a stand? You tie me up and still expect me to lend you a helping hand’ (No End In Sight)

Yeah, it’s Yambag.  So, you know the score.   It’s fast – always.  It’s relentless – always.  It’s 11 tracks in just under 11 minutes.  And while all of this is wholly accurate, it conveys only part of the story.  The sheer precision of the whiplash tempo changes melded with the Cleveland band’s intrinsic velocity create an album that has not an ounce of extravagance yet still brims with an unrestrained brio.

From the eruption of opener Ancient Relic until the trippy calm of closer El Funeral De Mr. E, the pace is remorselessly frenetic.  The drums remain the fulcrum, furiously fast, morphing into frenzied blast beats when the intensity threatens to overwhelm, only occasionally relenting into a more mid-paced groove.  Yambag eschew the breakdown, the only moments of relative respite offered are when the drums briefly duck from view to allow the jolting guitars or rumbling bass to fleetingly carry the weight.

Often, with music of such intensity, the lyrics find themselves constrained to a similar brevity.  Not here though as the sneering, rhythmically spat vocals unleash a tirade of deftly constructed, rapid-fire tirades as they span the chains of tradition (Ancient Relic) and battling a sense that social change can never be realised (No End In Sight), to the dangerous distortions and misinformation of social media on the title track.

‘Siento un odio eterno, Fruto del abuso de los viejxs, Tengo un dolor eterno, Soy victima y presa de la Máquina destruye sueños (Máquina Destruye Sueños) ‘I feel eternal hatred, Fruit of the abuse through the ages, I have eternal pain, I am a victim and prey of the Machine that destroys dreams’ (Machine Destroys Dreams)

Mexico City’s Eléctrika (Electricity) return with a blistering new EP, Máquina Destruye Sueños (Machine Destroys Dreams), a follow-up to their 2022 self-titled debut.  Taking a starting point of Japanese noise fuelled hardcore, the band forge elements of crust, d-beat, and crossover thrash into a searing battery.  This blend is perfectly encapsulated by the stomping brutality of Abstinencia (Abstinence) and pounding fury of closer, No Tenemos Nada (We Have Nothing), which even flirts with a darkly discordant melodicism.

The harshly metallic guitars and thunderous rhythm section provide the perfect complement to the rasping, utterly rabid Spanish vocals.  Lyrically, the EP explores themes of social marginalisation and economic exploitation, together with the rage and sense of helplessness induced by a system so deeply entrenched that it seems impervious to change.

Cincinnati’s The Drin return with their fourth full-length, Elude The Torch, and continue to hone their uniquely evocative dub fuelled post punk as they fiercely forge a myriad of influences from bluegrass to dark folk into a vibrantly cohesive soundscape.

I had the good fortune of catching The Drin when they played London back in April.  Now, as much as I’ve loved their three preceding LPs for their dense yet catchy complexity, for some reason I couldn’t quite frame what to expect in the live setting.  But as the hypnotically propulsive rhythm section and raucous saxophone kicked in, I knew it was going to be something pretty special – perhaps, more immediate, even more instinctual.  And the band’s craft in gradually ratcheting up the intensity through the set to a point verging on the euphoric was impressively relentless. Music to lose yourself in and, to be honest, we can all do with some of that at the moment.  Even the tambourines worked.  Yeah, it was that good.

And Elude The Torch perfectly captures the qualities that defined The Drin’s live incarnation. It is a vivid exploration of how to layer sound, rooted in intricate instrumentation and a lust to experiment, without ever bowing to the false lure of self-indulgence.  The bedrock is the driving rhythm section that both grounds the band’s more esoteric elements, while also ensuring a remorseless, mesmerising propulsion.  The languid, drawled, largely spoken word vocals act as a starkly contrasting yet equally consistent counterpoint as they conjure a cryptically allusive, poetically introspective narrative.

With these two elements locked in, the band’s instrumental palette is given full rein – the guitars swing from trippy wah-wah to hauntingly atmospheric bluegrass, while flares of raucous mouth organ, squalls of discordant saxophone, darkly resonant strings, and eerily skeletal piano all feed into a darkly foreboding, irresistibly immersive atmosphere.  And while the song writing is undeniably tight, the album brims with a writhing improvisational energy, as it segues seamlessly from spectral dissonance to passages that are almost transcendentally infectious.  So go on, elude the torch, embrace The Drin – it’s quite the journey.

‘Ricordati questa passione, Redefinire cos’é il valore, una vita che brucia enternamente, insieme c’é sempra potere’ (Insieme C’é Potere) ‘Remember this passion, Redefine value, A life that burns eternally, Together there’s always strength’ (Together There is Strength)

Following their blistering debut EP, Immagini Postume (Posthumous Image), New Yorks’s Mirage return on rampant form with their first full-length, Legato Alla Rovina (Bound To Ruin).  From the moment the rumbling bass unfurls beneath the squalling feedback and then coalesces into the bleakly crystalline melody that defines opener Nuclear Plague, it is clear that Mirage will continue to unleash their distinctively burly yet nuanced reimagining of off-kilter 1980s’ Italian hardcore.

The frantic, surging delivery is shrouded throughout with an invigorating, discordant dark punk melodicism, while largely Italian vocals range from the stridently raw to the ominously spoken word.  Lyrically, the album evokes an apocalyptic future driven by society’s boundless greed and distorted priorities without ever losing hope that our collective spirit can yet offer redemption.  Personal stand-out moments include the visceral velocity of Insieme C’é Potere (Together There Is Strength), the soaring brilliance of Il Giorno Dell’Amore E Violenza (The Day Of Love And Violence), and the stomping savagery of Uomo Settico (Septic Man).

‘Perfectly curated illusion of freedom, obey the machine, worship the system, an answer to enforce every belief, abstraction to mask all of our grief’ (Silent Morality)

Having honed their bruising sound on two EPs, 2018’s Use Abuse Destroy and 2020’s Delirious Void, Perth’s No Future take their full-length bow with venomous aplomb on Mirror.  The thunderous d-beat fuelled, cymbal awash drums and bone shudderingly resonant bass lines inject a swaggering malevolence to proceedings, underpinning the waves of cacophonous, noise-infused riffage.  This is a groove fired recipe that comes together with particular brutality on Silent Morality, P.B.S., and Vampiric Ego Fucker.

But it is, perhaps, the vocals that demand centre stage.  Whereas we might expect a guttural roar, we are treated to powerfully rasping, reverb accented, rather than saturated, vocals that drip with undisguised contempt for those in power and the entrenched privileges they protect.  Silent Morality examines our own complicity in the capitalist system, Pig Fiend those who pay lip service to notions of equality with no thought to the damage wreaked by their knowing exploitation (‘Corrupted, crooked smile, pathetic smirk of power’), and Progress? the warped rationalities that infect us all (‘Beliefs that endlessly echo, a mental vice that can’t let go’).  It may well be a desolate message, but it is one delivered with compelling conviction.

Oslo’s Assistert Sj​ø​lmord make their vinyl debut with a blistering seven track EP which reanimates its 1980s’ inspirations with an utterly feral vitality.

Featuring members of Draümar and Indre Krig, Assistert Sj​ø​lmord (Assisted Suicide) fuses a base of breathless 1980s’ Norwegian hardcore with the catchy hooks of SoCal punk and the pounding rhythms of UK82 to furious effect as harshly clean guitars are intertwined with absolutely rabid Norwegian vocals.  From the opening eruption of Klimabombe (Climate Bomb), the intensity never drops for even a second, peaking, perhaps, with Toxicity, with its wailing guitar opening, and rampaging closer La Oss Dø (Let Us Die).

Rome’s Trans Upper Egypt return with No Dub, their third album of bass driven, motorik beat fuelled jazz-punk.

The tightly compact formula for No Dub is executed with an unerring yet vibrant consistency.  Deeply resonant, infectiously repetitive dub influenced bass lines in a lock-step partnership with fluidly supple, crisply punchy drumming form the foundation.  Waves of dissonant, acid-tinged organs and flourishes of haunting brass weave their own often distinct psychedelic paths, while the spectral vocals are in part spoken word, in part chanted mantra, blurred and disembodied.

But let’s return to that rhythm section, which is utterly hypnotic.  To reduce it to metronomic feels reductive bearing in mind its fierce dexterity.  It is undoubtedly precise yet also richly detailed and textured.  There is a sense of all enveloping possession – even if you wanted to escape, you wouldn’t be able to break the trance, your body jerking in syncopated unison, gripped by the inexorable rhythms.

In many respects, the album is best understood as a single movement defined by subtle variations on a single unifying, mesmerising theme.  Quite simply, from the opening one-two of 33 and Benghe (Good Luck), it does not let go even for a second, not least on the brilliantly expansive Itali (Italians).  And the artwork finishes things off perfectly – after all, who doesn’t love a young caiman crocodile?

‘No one cares what came before, They stripped it of its very core, Now people they can’t tell what the hell they moved here for’ (Ain’t What It Used To Be)

Peace de Résistance is the solo project of Institute’s Moses Brown and Lullaby For The Debris, his second album, following on from 2022’s debut, Bits And Pieces.  The fundamentals that made Bits And Pieces such a memorable record remain firmly in place.  The starting point is Brown’s love of Zamrock (a 1970s’ fusion of traditional Zambian polyrhythms with more contemporary heavy rock instrumentation), which he has then reconnected with swaggering glam rock and reimagined through his own DIY punk sensibility.

But at the same time, progression is equally clear.  The overriding aesthetic is, perhaps, more refined, less determinedly lo-fi.  The songs energetically crafted, quietly infectious.  From the shimmering riff that defines opener You Are Absurd to the noir-tinged The Funny Man, from the wildly skittering piano flourish that kicks off the rollicking Fast Money, to the plaintive brass of the title track, this is an album rich in detail and texture.

Brown’s vocal delivery remains a languorous drawl that belies an anger robustly rooted in exploring class consciousness through the modern nexus of low pay, urban dispossession of the working class, and the wider rentier economy.  The strutting 40 Times The Rent examines housing insecurity (‘The ground’s unstable, when homes aren’t purchasable’) and Ain’t What It Used To Be how our cities are frequently hollowed out at the behest of real estate capital, while Pay Us More bluntly decries the exploitation at the heart of the economic system (‘It’s time that working full time made you a living’).

And, throughout, the album is bleakly cognisant of just how embedded the status quo remains.  Coddle The Rich recognises our own complicity (‘The compromises that you’ve made for pay checks and the duplex that you pay for’) and Fast Money a system geared to protecting privileged interests (‘You took the handout and where does it go? Bonuses, not me and Joe’).  The title track delivers a ruminative finale that fears that change will never come (‘Left in the wake of recklessness and greed, She said, “It’s fine monsieur, why change anything?”’).

Porta d’Oro’s (Golden Door) buoyantly ethereal debut album, Cosí Dentro Come Fuori (Both Inside And Outside), is the solo project of Giacomo Stefanini and sees him hone a myriad of influences into a thoroughly hypnotic and deeply meditative journey.

Based in Milan, Stefanini has been a mainstay of a range of Italian DIY punk projects over the past decade, including Mirrorism, Kobra, and, most recently, Festa Del Perdono.  The latter is, perhaps, the most relevant reference point as Porta d’Oro shares a similar lo-fi inventiveness and poetically inclined aesthetic.  A woozily dub infused rhythm section is overlain with fuzzy synths and flares of taut post-punk guitar, augmented by flourishes of brass.  The lyrical themes are fragmented and impressionistic, with a largely spoken word delivery, sometimes, in solemn solitude and, at others, tantalisingly layered.

The opening track Conta I Passi La Lepre (The Hare Counts The Steps) with its languid blend of strummed guitar and tinkling piano lures you into the album’s embrace, which can at times feel almost ephemeral.  Yet whenever it threatens to dissolve, it reasserts its grip with surprising vigour, such as on the unexpectedly strident Bleah! and the entrancing slow-build of Un Sasso Nero (A Black Stone).

As Side Two opens, both the title track and Lá (There) are built around eerily minimalist, impossible to shake melodies.  The darkly swirling Notte E Giorno (Night And Day), with its chanted mantra climax, then follows before all of the intertwined elements that have preceded converge on the prophetically titled and incrementally dissembling closer Tutto Crolla (Everything Collapses).  Intriguingly, the album’s mood is one that seems to somehow shift to reflect your own, being quietly hopeful while simultaneously rooted in a melancholic pragmatism.

Torino’s SabaSaba return with Unknown City, a bleakly evocative invocation of a future defined by social segregation, the othering of the marginalised, and the siren call of authoritarianism.

Whereas the band’s 2018 self-titled debut drew on the works of JG Ballard and William Gibson, Unknown City is a sonic interpretation of China Miéville’s 2009 novel, The City And The City.  The story is set in a post-Soviet Balkans state, which sees two cities, Bezel and Ul Quoma, occupy the same place while being seen as entirely separate by their respective citizens.  This is not a physical border, but rather one born of perception and custom.

Inhabitants are effectively trained to ignore one another, to knowingly ‘unsee’.  The band’s homage lends new force to the novel’s central themes of how people are conditioned to ignore that which does not directly impact us and to dissociate for harm being done in our name, which frequently makes us complicit in the socio-economic inequalities that define our society.

The duo skilfully conjures a remorselessly suffocating landscape as they lead us into this dystopian realm, a tale of both refusing to see and of being unseen.  The album slowly uncoils, relentlessly building impetus before once again folding in on itself, a constant process of assembly and disassembly on a hazy, uncertain journey.  Hauntingly monochrome synthesisers and programmed drums form the bedrock, over which eerily disembodied voices, spectral chants, and scratchy analogue instrumentation flare.  Central to the darkly disorientating atmosphere that evolves is the mournful yet strident viola of Ambra Chiara Michelangeli that is deftly woven through the album.

Stand out moments include the viola propelled Desert Cathedral, the infectiously discordant Night Plotters, and the utterly entrancing Wrists Free, featuring industrial techno duo Jerome.  As the album reveals itself, you can’t help but envisage yourself in the smog-filled, intensely surveilled streets of a city inherently at unease with itself, unwilling to look itself in the eye, burdened as much by its history as by its ambiguous future.

‘Up here in my tower, I can see the west through the haze, The kids across the street are learning, I’m trying not to rust’ (Ants)

What would being trapped in a negative gear feel like?  Anyone who had the misfortune of listening to what passed for economic debate in the recent UK General Election might be able to hazard a guess – the grinding, churning failed consensus of ‘fiscal discipline’ and trickle-down economics being blindly dredged once again, leaving communities relentlessly battered and civic infrastructure fundamentally decayed.  Imagine harnessing the fury that this vacuous debate induced and using it to forge bleakly discordant, but ineffably catchy post-punk.  There you go, welcome to Moraliser.

Hailing from Sydney, Negative Gears made their debut with an excellent self-titled 12-inch in 2019, although the sketched cover art of a man diving headfirst on to a razor blade still stalks my subconscious.  The five-year interlude has been used very wisely indeed.  A propulsively resonant rhythm section, blessed with some wonderfully pulsating bass lines, sets the fluid tone through which the taut, melancholically dissonant melodies are woven, alongside electronic flare-ups and skeletal piano.  Meanwhile, the vocals are austerely detached, a detachment not born of apathy, but rather a palpable, bristling contempt for the priorities of our late-stage capitalist society.

Choppy opener, Negative Gear (‘The puritan idea, Of virtue through suffering, Justifying my self-harm, Is ironically lost on me’) kicks things off perfectly, prior to the band delivering an absolute killer one-two.  The utterly infectious Ants, with its haunting mantra of ‘I’m alone in paradise’, explores our increasingly segregated cities, and then the blisteringly acerbic semi-spoken word of Attention To Detail (‘Lost in the belief, Belief you deserve it, I wonder if you’ll even figure out if it was worth it’), which you have no choice but to chant along with in doomed unison, dissects how we’ve all become lost in the warped rationality of these increasingly dystopian times.

And the impetus doesn’t dim on the flipside.  The band continue to explore themes of social alienation and isolation on the darkly off-kilter Pills and hypnotic Connect, before the swirling frustrations and dashed hopes of Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet brings the album to a furious finale that is as lyrically desolate as it is musically uplifting.

‘Can’t shake the feeling that you would rather me be dead, Waste of space, waste of time, waste of love, I am nothing, Trust the process, I am dying, I will starve until I die’ (Trust The Process)

Melbourne’s Diploid return with a new blistering five-track EP, Mantra, and follow-up to 2021’s coruscating full-length, I Am Yours. And I am Here Again.  Their fierce blend of grindcore and chaotic hardcore continues to be refined as it is woven through with slabs of muscular death metal-tinged riffs, flourishes of discordant melody, and bruising blast beat fuelled eruptions.

Meanwhile, guttural roared and harrowingly harsh vocals intertwine and interchange to devastating effect.  Lyrically, bleakly allusive imagery of self-doubt, body image, starvation, and coping strategies tell both a deeply personal story, while simultaneously evoking the devastating social inequality and environmental exploitation being wreaked in the name of progress.

As ever, the band’s delivery is elevated by two defining characteristics.  Firstly, an unbridled velocity that few can match and that simply leaves you reeling.  And, secondly, their skilled grasp of the dynamics of song building that ensure that each track retains a keen sense of its own identity amid the unrelenting onslaught.

The savage opening title track sets the tone perfectly before feeding into the brutal riffage of Denial Defensive.  The intensity is unyielding across the more melodic fury of Me And My Numbers and the monolithic Practice Of Perishing, before the utterly compelling Trust The Progress sees a swaggering opening salvo dissolve into an agonised, squalling climax.  An absolute sledgehammer of an EP, sonic violence applied with punishing precision and inventive dexterity.

‘Distruggo le fondamenta di un destino che non ho scelto, Il presagio di un eterno ritorno, Noi non siamo eco, L’anima ormai in framenti può spezzare il meccanismo?’ (Oltre) ‘I destroy the foundation of a destiny I didn’t choose, The omen of an eternal recurrence, We’re not just echoes, Can a soul now in pieces break the system?’ (Beyond)

Milan’s Lucta are back with their debut album, Eterna Lotta (Eternal Struggle), a follow-up to 2018’s demo, Black Magic Punks.  The band forge an unholy alliance between dark punk and 1980s’ Italian hardcore.  This sees the band unleash a rabidly lean onslaught that segues seamlessly from blistering riffage to eruptions of stomping mid-paced power, laced throughout with flourishes of fuzzed out, mystically-tinged melodicism.

The centrepiece though is the Italian vocals – strident, semi-shouted, with just a dash of melody, they are delivered with truly venomous intent.  Lyrically, the album explores themes of rage with current social injustices, while simultaneously grappling with a sense of helplessness and a defiant recognition that this is a particular battle that will never end.  Stand out moments include the slab-like ferocity of Il Peso Di Ieri (The Weight Of Yesterday), the rhythmic, staccato fury of Oltre (Beyond), and the cathartically charged closing title track.

From the moment the haunting intro to the opening track, Cujo, begins to unfurl, you suspect that we are in for something of a treat.  And London’s Hellscape do not disappoint on this their darkly enticing self-titled debut 7-inch.

Rasping, desperately urgent vocals brook no debate as they lure you into the band’s maelstrom of clean yet burly hardcore riffage draped in melancholy fuelled death rock melodies.  The EP is riven with a spiky sepulchral energy and deploys the power of repetition to compelling effect.  The opening track concludes on the haunting cry of ‘Hang me from the balcony’, while the repeated mantra of ‘I know it’s wrong’ defines the galloping Intravenous, and surging first side closer Dybbuk, a malicious possessing spirit in Hebrew mythology, poses the pressing question of ‘What do you know of revenge?’.

Side Two opens with the intense eruption of Traitor’s Gate before the fiercely layered vocals of the more expansive Samson.  And then, a further unexpected twist, as the EP closes out with the groove-laden, grunge-fuelled The Grave, with its spectral tale of watery tombs.