Abyetca are a two-piece operating at varying times between Barcelona and Chile.  This full-length brings together the band’s two savage four-track EPs, 2020’s Infrafuturo (Infrafuture) and 2022’s Enemigos De La Razon (Enemy Of Reason).

‘Ha llegado el momento, No te lo haré tan fácil, Seré una bengala humana, Muerte en vida es tu silencio’ (Justicia Personal) ‘The moment has come, I won’t make it so easy for you, I will be a human flare, Death in life is your silence’ (Personal Justice)

The latter of these two EPs constitutes Side A of this compilation and perfectly captures the band’s distinctive blend of fast-paced hardcore punk, which draws liberally on both Burning Spirits Japanese hardcore and mid-1980s thrash metal.  Dense yet catchy metallic riffage is underpinned by a rolling, surging rhythm section.  Meanwhile, fiercely rasping, rhythmically nuanced Spanish vocals – which include harrowing screams on the title track and Justicia Personal – dissect themes ranging from religious oppression and the mistreatment of migrants to the fight for personal autonomy.

‘No gana la guerra quien más armas tenga, El que no hace ruido ya esta muerto’ (Las Fuerzas) ‘He who has the most weapons does not win the war, He who does not make noise is already dead’ (The Forces)

Side B then captures the band’s debut release.  The sound is a rawer, looser one, more avowedly bass driven.  And while the d-beat rhythms and metallic guitar flourishes are still very much in evidence, there is also a more pronounced nod towards aggressively paced, melodically complex hardcore punk in the vein of Burning Kitchen.  Perhaps, the stand-out tracks across the album are the urgently propulsive Final (End) and the bleakly melodic Las Fuerzas.

‘A fairytale or myth, So far removed from life, But when its at your doorstep, There’s nowhere safe to hide’ (Right To Your Door)

French political philosopher Michel Foucault developed a compelling theory of the ‘boomerang effect’ to examine how techniques of social and military control deployed by colonial powers in overseas territories often migrate back to the West in the form of domestic oppression, ‘an internal colonialism’.  This effect has become ever more powerful in contemporary society with militarised patterns of policing, incarceration, and surveillance flowing back from the “war on terror”.

The rampaging new album from British Columbia’s Bootlicker explores how we all currently suffer a 1000 Yard Stare from this very process.  Sonically, the band’s template remains consistent.  A burly and satisfyingly fluid blend of UK82 and 1980s’ US hardcore with a healthy dash of driving d-beat.  The blistering guitars remain notably clean, almost scratchy in texture, which gives plenty of space to breathe for the thunderous yet dynamic rhythm section and aggressively guttural vocals.

The human costs of military adventurism form the initial lyrical fulcrum on tracks such as the opener State Property and Held By Threads.  The focus then shifts to how these ills have fed back into wider society in the form of social control (On All Fours), economic inequality (Billionaire Bunker), and a willingness to blame the most marginalised for our predicament (With Reason).  While Red Serge traces the roots of the first paramilitary presence in Canada, who later evolved into the The Royal Canadian Mountain Police.  So, drop the needle and strap in for the Bootlicker Effect!

‘Le monde trop vide, la vie trop courte, Le néant droit devant, Le monde trop vide, La vie trop courte, La peur au ventre et puis plus rien’ (La Fin) ‘The world too empty, life too short, Nothingness straight ahead, The world too empty, life too short, Fear in my stomach and then nothing’ (The End)

Faucheuse, featuring both current and ex-members of Bombardment, hail from Bordeaux and Rêve Électrique (Electric Dream) is their debut album.  The foundation of the band’s sound is ferocious, galloping d-beat riven through with a vivid rock’n’roll swagger.  Thereafter though, they meld a range of unexpected elements to this rock-solid backbone.  Bouncily elastic bass lines and fiery blues meets metal solos are interlaced with flourishes of dissonant electronics and a flaring, cascading organ.

Perhaps, most distinctively, the French vocals, which are clean sung and robustly melodic, conjure thoughts of classic heavy metal delivery.  Dramatic, at times almost operatic, yet injected throughout with a bristling punk energy and supported by catchily harmonized backing.  Somehow these somewhat unlikely bedfellows are honed into a powerfully cohesive, urgently energetic whole.

Stand out moments range from the skilfully crafted opener Foudre Fatal (Fatal Lightning) to the rollicking organ fuelled Le Cri (The Cry), and from the breathlessly infectious Vague Destructrice (Destructive Wave) to the ethereal harmonies of closer, Faucheuse (Reaper).

‘All of life, it happens here, in the light outside of the Spar, across the road, the neon sign for Leisureland still glows, they forgot to turn it off, when it closed’ (Leisureland)

There are many ways to tell a story.  The linear – you know beginning, middle, end.  Or you can take a more interwoven route to exploring the origins and consequences of an idea.  It is this latter approach that Neutrals take on this, their second full-length, and follow-up to 2022’s Bus Nights EP.

The starting concept for the album is the ‘new towns’ that were constructed in the UK during the 1950s and 1960s, many being overspill estates adjacent to major cities.  And, while by the 1980s, many of these cities from London to Liverpool were in a febrile state, the new towns had often become bywords for a more attritional, isolated social alienation.

Now, I know what your thinking – why would a band based in California’s Bay Area be concerning themselves with UK new towns?  All will become clear though as the vocals – a soft, broad Scottish brogue – appear, interlaced with a very British indie punk of bright, sharp guitars, with just a shimmer of jangle, underpinned by a sprightly, limber rhythm section and harmonised backing vocals.

The album unfolds through a rich tableau of short stories, each inspired by real life news stories from the era, expertly evoking a sense of both time and place.  After the sample-led title track, the regret-tinged Wish You Were Here is a tale of a Spanish holiday romance, while the stridently robust Stop The Bypass remembers the widespread environmental protests against road expansion schemes, and the surging Last Orders is a tale of volatile, headstrong friendship.

Side Two sees the jaunty The Iron That Never Swung tell the bizarre story of the golf club without a course, before segueing into the pulsing electronics, spoken word, and haunting choral crescendo of ‘another paunchy middle-aged raver’ on How Did I Get Here.  The album closes on the spikily infectious, tightly crafted Substitute Teacher and Phantom Arcade, a darkly comedic tale of stolen arcade games, copper theft, and an unfortunately timed demolition.

And as with all social historical excavations, the album also casts light on how little has changed.  Politicians still tout new towns as a panacea to a housing shortage created by their policies, communities are still compelled to fight council attempts to drive them from their homes in the name of ‘progress’, and we still work remarkably hard to make sure that the young have nowhere to go but the corner outside the local Spar.

‘Hoard The Land, hoard the houses, collect the rent, collect the wages, passive income…If you can’t inherit someone else’s wealth, you’re going to be left living on a shelf’ (Landlord Nation)

Now, this is an absolute steamroller of an album. Melbourne’s Cutters deliver a rampaging lesson in burly, no nonsense hardcore, but its seething intensity does not dictate any lack of subtlety or invention.  Hoarsely impassioned vocals are intertwined with venomous, infectious riffage and flares of dissonant melody, while underpinned by a rhythm section of strutting, swaggering intensity.

The utterly raucous fury of Landlord Nation, the brilliantly discordant Depresso Rant No.69, and the surging First Of Many set the tone.  But the band prove equally adept in their more expansive moments, from the relentless slow burn escalation of Frail In The Mind to the groove fuelled crescendo of Glass Tomb.

As with the band’s earlier three EPs, the lyrical focus is a coruscating deconstruction of our current bleak social malaise.  The fierce opener, Airport Smoking Lounge, delivers a powerful allegory for environmental degradation (‘Draw it in around you, take in the sights and sounds’) and Doomscroller deals with the consequences of all permissive technology (‘Books don’t hit the same, songs don’t hit the same, life don’t hit the same, I can’t think’).

Meanwhile, Landlord Nation has the excesses of rentier capitalism firmly in its crosshairs and Jobs For The Boys deals with how those in power relentlessly fail upwards in our supposed meritocracy (‘Insincere, insipid, redundant, not even fit to sell real estate’).  But the album ends on an almost hopeful note with closer, Revelations Of Divine Love, defiantly seeing the chance for a better future amidst the squalling guitars (‘There’s a strength in every living creature against every fiend from hell’).

‘Nothing changes in the land of parking lots and killing sprees, They don’t care’ (Lost Illusion)

Invertebrates share several members with fellow Richmond, Virginia band, Public Acid.  However, while the latter unleash savage metallic hardcore, Invertebrates move in rather different circles stripping their sound back to classic 1980s’ US hardcore.  There is no room for indulgence or flamboyance – this is a debut album pared to the bone, defined by rasping vocals, blistering riffs, and pounding drums.

But this should not be confused with simplicity.  The riffage is fluid yet complex and the band prove experts at judging the tempo changes and melodic flare-ups that ensure maximum impact.  Personal standouts include fierce opener No More, the bristling Bated Breath that builds to an utterly crushing crescendo, and the infectious melodic flourish that defines Humid Crypt.

The album proves the perfect soundtrack to examine the financial exploitation of our cities on Lost Illusion and Sterilized Decay (‘Stagnant social disease, aimed at killing all culture, profits the only intention’), while the title track focuses on our march to environmental catastrophe (‘Too busy with their greed to stay alive’) and Laughing System on the systemic indifference that drives our economic system (‘Numb from constant casualties, They laugh when they see you, Just another failed statistic’).

‘Explosion of wealth, by murderous events, environmental and civil threats.  Constructed to loot prosperity, system benefiting from trading death. Parasites don’t suffer’ (Security By Sacrifice)

Hailing from Austin, and featuring members of Severed Head Of State, Vaaska, and Program, Peace Decay return with a self-titled follow-up to their 2022 debut Death Is Only….  The band continue to evolve their sound, which is a searing fusion of Burning Spirit Japanese hardcore and more contemporary neo-crust influences.  Setting the foundations are gruff, guttural vocals, galloping crust riffage, and a thunderous rhythm section surging forward in punishing lockstep.

Meanwhile, it is the lead guitar that takes centre stage, at times working in parallel with the wider band, and at the other times carving a more distinct path.  Throughout, it maintains a highly melodic, dramatic, rhythmically dense texture with soaring solos that very much draw on New Wave of British Heavy Metal traditions.

Highlights include the groove laden Lights Out, Hell In and swaggering Repetition.  Lyrically, the band favour darkly allusive imagery as they explore the slow violence of capitalism on Lights Out, Hell In and Security By Sacrifice, while Parasitic Jackal and First Order grapple with the corrosive consequences that ensue.

‘Because these days are ours to take, Seize with union, love, and rage’ (Retribution)

The story of this island over the past forty years has been one of grossly distorted economic priorities that have led us to our current juncture of dehumanising poverty, entrenched inequality, crumbling infrastructure, and hollowed-out public services.  If you were to conjure the sonic manifestation of the rage that this induces, it would almost certainly sound an awful lot like Stevenage’s Bad Breeding.

Returning with their fifth full-length, Contempt, and follow-up to 2022’s searing Human Capital, Bad Breeding are in rampaging form.  Ominously distorted guitars, laced with bleakly melancholic melodies set the tone, while a richly resonant bass injects a healthy swing to proceedings alongside the pounding, propulsive drums.  Meanwhile, rasping, semi-shouted vocals compete with eruptions of squalling solos and blast beats, fuelling an atmosphere of sinister, disorientating menace.  The result is an even heavier iteration of the band’s anarcho-punk hardcore, veering at times into an almost industrial intensity.  Lyrically, the album explores the continued degradation of our society through neoliberalism, as well as examining our own complicity in the stranglehold that this rationality has exerted.

Proceedings open with the swaying, post-punk-tinged Temple Of Victory, that dissects the continued grip of the monarchy on our national imagination (‘Behind the callow smear and parades of ecstasy, is weakness sown in costume and buried in conceit’), before the viscerally furious Survival (‘Sold as a spectre, but fed on a drip, Crushed by the sanctity of capital worship’) and the savagely stomping Discipline (‘We feed on the necessity, to plunder flesh and earth, for a surplus we will never see’) tackle the conspiracy of inaction in the face of climate catastrophe.

Side Two opens with a swaggering call to action, Retribution, and the discordant, serpentine Gilded Cage / Sanctuary, then explores the harrowing impacts of economic austerity (‘In the haze of someone’s prosperity, Count the boarded shopfronts and eyes glossed with grief’).  Meanwhile, the bristling Vacant Paradise is a brutal denunciation of our willingness to co-operate with a system that degrades us (‘The warmth of uniformity, Gutted of self-respect’).  The furiously dissonant title track brings the album to an utterly crushing climax (‘Is this the house we really built, or just the ruins we’re forced to bear?’).

An accompanying booklet contextualises the album’s themes as well as including short essays on our failure of will to tackle homelessness, and the ongoing badger cull, which is as barbaric as it is illogical.  The package is completed by stunning artwork courtesy of renowned campaigning photomontage artist, Peter Kennard.

Modern Life Is War return with a new album that brings together the three volumes of the Tribulation Worksongs into a single release.

Modern Life Is War were initially active between 2002 and 2008, releasing three full lengths, the most acclaimed of which was, perhaps, 2005’s Witness.  They were to prove a defining band in the wave of melodic hardcore that came to shape that decade.  But while most of their contemporaries emerged from traditional coastal hardcore centres, MLIW hailed from Iowa, imbuing their music with a distinctive Midwestern accent.  A voice that favoured politics with a small ‘p’, framed in a humane, ground-up perspective and rooted in a clear sense of the value of community.

The band reformed in 2012, releasing a new album, Fever Hunting, in 2013 and then a series of three 7-inches – each a volume of the Tribulation Worksongs.  This LP is a compilation of the tracks that spanned this series.  Now, typically, with a compilation of 7-inch material, you might expect some unevenness.  But, in fact, there is a powerful coherency that unites the tracks, both sonically and thematically.  Indeed, as aesthetically lovely as the EPs were (vocalist Jeffrey Eaton typed the lyrics to each song on his vintage typewriter), the songs as a musical statement build even more impact in this unified, reordered form.

The album opens with Feels Like End Times and Revival Fires, two classically constructed MLIW tracks – raw, impassioned vocals interplay with lean, darkly melodic guitars, and a surging rhythm section, defined by peaks of almost winding emotional intensity.  Both tracks tackle the social and economic malaise gripping the US heartlands, the former tackling its political exploitation (‘Find another working class apologist. I am not your shill’) and the latter a plea for renewal (‘This land was begging for breath and pleading to be peeled back’).  The side closes with the raucous, swinging Survival, which adapts the lyrics to Marcia Griffith’s reggae classic of the same title.

The flipside opens with the darkly brooding Lonesome Valley Ammunitions (‘Steal someone else’s dreams, to satisfy your own’).  Then follows the slow burn, spoken word brilliance of Indianapolis Talking Blues (‘Countless broken backs for countless useless products’), the impact of which is ferociously amplified by segueing into a rollicking cover of The Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog, before End Times Dub, a percussion fuelled remix of the opening track, brings the album to a thunderous conclusion.

‘Profit is everything amidst a crumbling vile decay.  They don’t care; just useful plebs in their power game’ (Those Who Gave Us Yesterday)

Let’s be honest if you are not even a touch angry with the state of the world, then you have not been really paying much attention.  A silver lining, and a rather welcome one at that, is that this bleak state of affairs has provoked a return to action for Boston’s The Hope Conspiracy.  Featuring current and former members of All Pigs Must Die, Harvest, Paint It Black, and The Suicide File, the band was originally active during the noughties, releasing three albums, and a slew of EPs.  Following their return with last year’s Confusion/Chaos/ Misery EP, this is, in fact, the band’s first full-length since 2006’s Death Knows Your Name.  And time has only stoked their fury.

As the ominous opening riff to Those Of Who Gave Us Yesterday unfurls over wailing air raid sirens you brace yourself for what is to follow – roared, impassioned vocals, wisps of sombre melody overlay menacing groove-laden riffage that feeds into a punishing chorus, while a thunderous rhythm section unleashes an almost tribal barrage.  And the intensity never diminishes as the band evoke a relentlessly desolate, claustrophobic atmosphere.  This brutal battery is leavened by flourishes of discordant melody and passage of dissonant foreboding, from the surging The Prophets And Doom to the slab-like Shock By Shock, and from the bruising The West Is Dead to the unsettling The Specter Looms.

This is an album literally steeped in rage – every sinew of its being is straining to challenge the distorted priorities of our age.  The mirage of our increasingly zombified democracies, their knowing capitulation to the rapacious demands of capital, and the resultant exploitation and oppression are the defining themes, ‘A tragic noose, tight around all our necks’ (Of A Dying Nation).

‘They live inside your brain, they’ll take control, they’ll take your soul, outside the limits of your sight, they hide behind the static’ (Nuclear Age)

You could probably write, in fact, I’m sure someone will have done, a pretty diverting thesis on the interactions between place and music – how one shapes the other.  That is not to say that musical styles cannot travel with reasonable success, but rather that there exists an organic connection between certain places and certain ‘sounds’.  A clear example of this would be the melodic hardcore punk that has emerged in waves of varying intensity over the past forty years from Southern California.

The latest flagbearers are Orange County’s Bloodstains.  The band took their 7-inch bow in 2023 and this, their self-titled debut full-length, has swiftly followed.  All the hallmarks you would anticipate are firmly in place – the nasal, back of throat vocals, darkly melodic guitars that are just the right side of burly, an aggressively supple rhythm section.  But, perhaps, more importantly each track is tightly crafted and delivered with an undeniable vigour as the band explore themes of political disaffection, social control, military adventurism, and police violence.

In a reasonably ballsy move, the album kicks off with a surging surf-infused instrumental, The Last Rites, which sets up what follows perfectly.  The stomping Nuclear Age and the fierce crescendo to Combat Shock are highlights of side one.  Meanwhile, side two includes the remarkably infectious Anti-Social, which is defined by a haunting melody that you will quite possibly never shake.  However, perhaps, the stand-out track is the irresistibly constructed Suburban Suicide, before the melancholic Stray Bullets provides a bleakly robust finale.

Something Looming is the first release from London’s Marcel Wave (featuring members of Sauna Youth and Cold Pumas) and what a thoroughly well-realised debut it proves to be.

Taut, clean guitars and a swinging, supple rhythm section provide the perfect foundation for the more esoteric elements of the band’s sound – organ and vocals.  The former veers from the jauntily uplifting to the jarringly discordant, injecting each track with its own distinctive atmosphere.  The latter take centre stage throughout, wryly observed and largely spoken word, they blend the melodically impassioned with the coldly angry and elegiacally poetic to memorable effect.

The buoyantly infectious Barrow Boys delves into the redevelopment of London’s Docklands, which established the template for selling off public land at a discount to developers – fuelling the city’s relentless exploitation by real estate capital (‘Have you ever had anything slip through your hand, like a grain of sand?’).  Similarly, the darkly brooding Where There’s Muck There’s Brass tells the tale of notorious Yorkshire architect / developer, John Poulson, who was jailed for corruption in 1974 (‘Had grubby fingers in many pies, bought off council officials, to build shoddy houses, houses that didn’t last’), and his bleak legacy in Bradford.

Discount Centre is a brilliantly off-kilter evocation of the urban edgelands that have subsequently emerged (‘I’m tired of all this greyscale, and drab retail parks’), and the hollowed-out town centres that then result are summoned in Great British High St (‘I used to go to Wimpy, eat with a knife and fork’).  Meanwhile, the uneasily discordant Mudlarks (‘What’s lost is recovered by time, a lapping wave, a careful eye’) and the vibrantly pulsating Stop/Continue (‘Now it laughs as it glides past, the ruins of our industrial past’) elicit voices from our history through the banks of the River Thames and deindustrialisation respectively.  And all rounded off with the band’s own rather stunning artwork.

British Columbia’s Earth Ball take their vinyl bow on It’s Yours and it proves a vibrant demonstration of the power of improvisation and experimentation.

I had the good fortune of catching Earth Ball on their recent UK tour.  The night I was able to get along to was billed as an improv show, which did set some of my more insular alarm bells ringing.  Said bells began to clang even louder, when I arrived at Cafe Oto in Dalston to see chairs arranged at the front (thankfully, there was plenty of standing room behind). But any reservations were soon blown away.

The band played three separate thirty-minute segments, collaborating with different artists in the first two, before everyone came together for the final set.  It was a remarkably immersive experience, as waves of instrumentation were incrementally layered upon one another, the momentum relentlessly ratcheted up, and the disparate strands eventually converging as one to a crescendo verging on industrial intensity, before then steadily deconstructing again to end on a haunting whisper.

And this is a pattern that similarly defines the band’s new album, It’s Yours.  This shouldn’t, perhaps, be surprising as the album’s writing process was also entirely improvisational.  The resonant bass and drums provide the band’s propulsion, their patterns often rooted in jazz, before locking into passages of more methodical, mechanical fervour.  Meanwhile, the saxophone and guitar weave their individual patterns, squalling, skronking, dissonant, and yet somehow organically intertwined, while semi-shouted vocals from the band’s co-vocalists occasionally emerge from the sonic barrage.

Two things struck me as I listened to the album and thought back to how the show evolved.  Firstly, is the importance of restraint when playing in an improvisational setting.  The temptation to let rip at all times must be pretty profound, but the key is of course discipline, knowing when to play, when not to, when to go full bore, and when to offer more subtle accenting.  And in this regard, hats off to Earth Ball’s saxophonist in particular, who perfectly judges his contributions throughout the evolving songs.

The second is around the nature of experimentation itself.  It is in the trying of new things that we discover what works and what doesn’t, and also in the act of trying that we stumble on new ideas and techniques.  And by seeing it live, it brought greater clarity to understanding how the album itself must have developed. Two particular moments are brought vividly to mind.  One, when the bass was played with what looked like a hand-held trident, it created a surge of shuddering, reverberating velocity.  Then two, when the guest pianist reached into the guts of his piano to pluck the strings directly – the resultant sound conjured visions of a big, angry demon being garrotted by a much smaller but considerably meaner one.

While comprising six tracks across its 42-minute run-time, It’s Yours is, perhaps, best understood as a single serpentine movement, one that swings from moments of almost feral discordance to passages of quietly beautiful introspection.  At times, it swirls and seethes in untold directions, and at others, it forges grooves of utterly infectious intensity.  It’s a journey that is definitely worth taking.

‘Nothing, nothing done for the right reason…We’re just slaves to greed, ignorance, manipulation…Where once cogs turned, now unseen…Truth is hidden, obscured by a screen’ (In The Stone)

Normil Hawaiians are a post-punk collective hailing from South London, who were initially active between 1979 and 1986.  They released three LPs and a raft of EPs during their original incarnation, a period during which their sound evolved in increasingly experimental directions.  The 2015 release by Upset The Rhythm of the band’s ‘lost’ album, Return of The Ranters, which was recorded in 1984/85, inspired the band to start playing music together again.  A series of live shows and new 7-inch in 2020 followed, before the band convened to record their first new album in nearly forty years.

The result is an album that stays true to the band’s latter-day roots of improvisation and experimentation, expertly fusing elements of ambient drone, driving motorik beats, and haunting folk.  The result is a shimmering, immersive soundscape defined by lush yet sparingly deployed instrumentation.  The songs take on an almost spectral quality as they weave together samples, interludes, and passages of spoken word to hypnotic effect, simultaneously both fragile and all-enveloping.

The album’s lyrical focus is set by the opening tracks Exiles and Ghosts of Ballochroy.  The former using samples to explore the plight of migrants, the latter darkly allusive poetry narrated by Scottish poet Rodney Relax to skewer the inequality riven through our society.  These are themes that are returned to on the meditative We Stand Together and the cosmic-tinged Big City Sky.  But, perhaps, the stand-out tracks are the beautiful, mournfully layered In The Stone and the more personal Back Home To The Stars, a thoroughly moving tribute to band member Mark Tyler who died during the recording of the album.

‘無関心の代償 見捨てられた街 魂の行方が お前に見えるか？’ / ‘The price of indifference, the forsaken city, can you see where the souls are going?’ (Realm)

Tokyo’s Klonns have released a slew of EPs since their formation in 2016, most recently 2022’s Crow, and now take their full-length bow on Heaven.  Over this period, the band’s sound has been one of constant evolution revolving around their core hardcore foundations, drawing initially on black metal and then d-beat.  Their current iteration feels leaner, less chaotic but still darkly metallic – think the negative hardcore ferocity of say Gehenna refracted through the prism of the mosh-inducing burliness of late 1980s’ East Coast hardcore and you will begin to get a sense of where we are at.

Having caught the band’s searing live performance in London a few weeks back, my expectations were running pretty high, and I’m pleased to say that they have not been disappointed.  Book-ended by two eerily rhythmic ambient electronic tracks is a brutally honed hardcore onslaught that is relentless in its intensity as blackened vocals and a swaggering rhythm section provide the perfect foils to the waves of surging metallic riffage.

The savage opening riff to Heathen sets the tone for the opening side with the bruising breakdown of Beherit and searing guest vocals courtesy of Sailor Kannako that bring Realm to a crushing crescendo, ensuring that there is no respite.  The pace does not dim on the flip side with stand-out moments including the stomping Replica and the savage closing title track.  Dual English and Japanese lyrics explore themes of regret, frustration, and despair through often bleakly allusive imagery.

‘Hides the lie that corrupted all your inside, Hides a code you could never crack, Hides a road you would never walk, While you sit in the joy of your reluctance, Wrath reloads its gun’ (Synchronicity)

Hailing from Rome, Sect Mark are back with their second full-length, Self-Obliteration, and follow-up to 2018’s Worship.  And have no fear, we are in for another dose of unbridled hardcore fury.  Raw, venomous, echo tinged vocals are intertwined with darkly menacing guitars and a ruthlessly precise rhythm section to create a bleakly dystopian atmosphere.

The album takes its philosophical lead from the Arthur Rimbaud poem Fêtes de la Faim (Feast of Hunger): ‘Eat, the stones that a poor man breaks, The old church masonry, Boulders, children of the floods, Loaves lying in the grey valleys’.  It primes the album’s urgent, primal call for change that manifests itself in the visceral, poetically violent lyrical imagery of social unrest and conflict as captured by Hand Don’t Feed (‘You gave us nothing, now we’ll pay back, Hand don’t feed, it never did’) and Denied Self (‘And all parades are beautiful when you end up hanged’).

The squalling, stomping opener, Traitor, sets the scene perfectly for the rabid barrage that follows.  Other stand-out moments include the barbarous eruption that is Fracture and the searing riffage that defines the utterly fierce Leech and Denied Self.

‘Deceiving only those afraid to say you’re faking, Which crime is more corrupt? It’s the cover up, Can’t you see the obvious harm underneath the charm?’ (Emperor)

Smell Of Money is the debut full-length from Texas three-piece, Wet Dip.  It catches you off guard from the very start as the opening track Rollercoaster kicks off with a brief, melodically sung vignette based on Dionne Warwick’s Valley Of Dolls and closes with the haunting cry of ‘When will I know, How will I know, When will I know why?’.  And from that point onwards the album relentlessly, restlessly writhes, its convulsions as organic as they are unexpected.

The guitar is largely skeletal, scratchy, abrasive.  The rhythm section is anxious, jittery, uneasy yet also, at times, undeniably infectious.  This stripped back palette provides the perfect backdrop to an utterly virtuoso vocal performance.  Alternating between Spanish and English, it sweeps from the stridently melodic to sardonically detached spoken word, from nursery rhyme innocence to the utterly venomous.

The track list includes two covers, Silver by The Pixies and Pelo Sulelto by Gloria Trevi, that are both so vividly reimagined by the band that they are absorbed seamlessly into the album’s sonic trajectory.  However, the highlights are Wet Dip’s own compositions – the surging Rollercoaster, the tensely juddering yet catchy Stray, the verging on jaunty Emperor, the discordant eruption that is Killfloor, with its memorable mantra, ‘Smells like shit, That’s the smell of money’.

The cover art pastiche of Husker Dü’s Zen Arcade (the two central silhouettes are now brawling), and the album title itself, leave you in little doubt that Citric Dummies don’t take themselves entirely seriously.

This is the Minneapolis’ trios fourth full-length and continues to build on the band’s trademark qualities.  Musically, we are talking raucous melodic punk delivered with a healthy hardcore aggression and a dash of rock’n’roll swagger. Highlights include the burly I’m Gonna Punch Larry Bird, Drugs In The Snow with its squalling saxophone, and the decidedly catchy Die Alone.

Lyrically, we have a swirling melting pot of the nihilistic on Everyone I Know Will Forget Me (‘Told my doctor I want to die, Asked my lawyer if he’d kill me’), the cynical on Being Male Is Embarrassing (‘Are these lyrics real, or am I just virtue suh-suh-signalling’), and the knowing on I Don’t Want to Live [Anymore] (‘This riff was lifted from The Fall, Just thought you should know’).  And while some of the songs are immersed in satirising pop culture, darker themes of depression and anxiety shape many of the tracks, such as My True Love Is Depression and I’m Gonna Kill Myself (At The Co-op), even if the handling remains firmly tongue-in-cheek.