‘Nos aplasta ya, nos desplazan ya, Nos arrastran a ese otro lado donde no quieren estar, El futuro es colonizado otra vez’ (El Himno Desentonado De Una Nación Moribunda) / ‘They crush us now, they displace us now, They drag us to that other side where they don’t want to be, The future is colonized again’ (The Dissonant Anthem Of A Dying Nation)

Mexico City’s Soga made quite a stir with their demo back in 2018, which was promptly put to vinyl by Iron Lung.  They are now back, and if you enjoyed that first release, you are going to absolutely love their debut album proper, Corrosión.  The trio deliver hardcore that is fast and intense, yet as you spend time with the album it begins to reveal layers that give an enduring depth beyond the raw immediacy.  And it is those unexpected twists that will keep drawing you back into its impassioned embrace.

At the heart of the band’s sound is their fiercely tight rhythm section, which locks in an unrelenting groove that, in turn, allows the guitar to indulge in its own freewheeling excursions into swaggering, blues fuelled solos.  The bassist and guitarist share vocal duties, and they alternate and overlay their semi-shouted vocals with an invigorating and confrontational dynamism.  The band’s tight grip on these fundamentals then affords them the scope to embrace more unexpected eruptions of late 1970s’ punk uproar and flares of post-punk melancholy with a wonderfully organic ease.

Meanwhile, Soga delve unflinchingly into the issues facing Mexican society from land seizures and gentrification to mass graves and disappearances, all while under the suffocating choke of state and church.  From the blistering opener, Mi Cadáver (My Corpse), it is an exhilarating ride as they sweep through the raucously unhinged El Himno Desentonado De Una Nación Moribunda to the melodically layered N, and then the urgently surging Comer Pavimento (Eat Pavement).

‘Blinded by perceived reflection, Forgetting honest compassion, Estranged by your own mind, Crying wolf, Self victimise, Emptiness reaped, Selfishness sewed’ (Narcissist)

Orc Party is an album that plunges us back to the late 1980s’, when hardcore and crust took thrash metal, and mutated it into something altogether more gnarly and nasty.  Yet this is no mere homage.  The savagery on display speaks to a band who not only love these influences but, featuring as they do current and former members of Firewalker, Scalpel, and Vaxine, have the technical chops to match their passion.

This is the New York band’s follow-up to 2022’s Destabilize and it takes things to a new level of intensity.  The haunting, swirling dungeon synths of Friendship perfectly prime the atmosphere, before we are pitched into the darkly thrashing maelstrom.  Here, growled vocals, blast beat eruptions, squalling solos, bloodcurdling howls, and Mick Harris-style barking yelps are all melded together with an unashamed relish.  It is the riffs though that steal the day.  From the bruising breakdowns that close out Narcissist and Goblin Mode, by way of the venomous grooves that define Time Is Fake and Hope Fucker, they are proper pit provokers.

In another call back, there is also a sense of mischief that runs through the record that provides a counterpoint to its seething misanthropy as it surveys the naked self-interest and delusion that is driving humanity to the brink.  All of which is invoked through the imagery of The Lord Of The Rings, obviously.  And just when you think you have a handle on proceedings, 80HD close out with a thumping industrial dance remix of Goblin Mode.

‘Hope is a weakness, Morbid fascination, Hold on to nothing, It never ends, The crushing weight, Of nothing new, Will you let it, Destroy you?’ (Speck Of Dust)

As the sarcasm saturated title implies, this is not an album that revels in Endless Joy but rather one founded in perpetual despair.  Reuniting three members of early noughties outfit Cold Sweat, who went on to play in Iron Lung and Private Room among others, it is a viscerally bleak record.

The Seattle band forge a brutal blend of blast beat fury, infectious grooves, and sludge-fuelled intensity.  They deftly ratchet the tension, marshalling these elements into a dozen sixty second eruptions, never allowing the barbarous velocity to collapse in on itself.  Indeed, it is those moments when the pace is slowed, and the lumbering menace given full rein, that they are at their most crushing.

Meanwhile, the rasping, semi-shouted vocals revel in a nihilistic contempt for the corroding forces of militarisation and religion within a society locked into a relentlessly downward spiral.  The highlights come thick and fast from the seething Burial Flag and the rhythmic swagger of Fools For Christ, before the positively swinging The Future Is Now and the cathartic finale of Another World.

‘Each morning you kneel, At the altar of fate, Without the company misery generates, Providing you, Their tools to sharpen, Whored out to sow, Their dark garden’ (The Dark Garden)

Los Angeles is a city of erasure, where the myths of economic boosterism have repeatedly sought to reshape it for the benefit of the few.  The result is a city where the scripted and sanitised still seek to block out the communities that form its heart, where a polarising divide between wealth and poverty is still entrenched.  This album is an ode to the strength of those communities to both survive and subvert.  A resolution that is now needed more than ever.

Cemento have been honing their gothic shrouded post-punk on a series of cassette-only releases before this, their debut album.  All of the fundamentals that this would imply – the baritone vocals, the soaring melancholy – are firmly in place.  Yet it is the accents and flourishes that Cemento nurture that imbue Bad Dream Songs with its thoroughly distinctive, darkly entrancing atmosphere.

The vocals that gently lean into their power yielding a drawled yet nuanced cadence.  The rhythm guitars that are taut with fuzzed out discordance.  The bottom end that brings a propulsive, loose-limbed swing.  And the dancing, mournful guitar leads that segue into vibrantly escalating solos draped in their own melancholic majesty.

It proves a powerfully evocative blend.  The shimmering opening to Better Days lures you inexorably into their bleakly euphoric reverie.  It is a grip that never eases from the bleakly contagious Black River to the bass fuelled On The Lord’s Day, and the chiming desolation of the title track.

‘Arrested, investigated, purged…Those who won’t conform must be crushed like insects, The shadow of utopia falls across their concrete cells and gravepits’ (Hidden Ruler [Kang Sheng])

A world sucked into a merciless mire of authoritarian control, state surveillance, militarised violence, and rapacious economic self-interest.  A misery saturated narrative that reeks of the indiscriminate horror that is of our present yet is also somehow both futuristically dystopian and shrouded in the imagery of medieval savagery.  Such an evocative combination can mean only one thing – the return of Portland’s Rigorous Institution.

Tormentor is the follow-up to the band’s searing 2002 debut full-length, Cainsmarsh.  The sonic fulcrum remains stenchcore braided through with a sense of gothic drama and growled vocals that appear to have been steeped in humanity’s degradation for all eternity.  Intriguingly though, Tormentor sees the band succeed in the fine balancing act of both intensifying their neanderthal brutality, while also nurturing their more experimental urges.

The former manifests itself in the utterly crushing riffage.  The uncompromisingly raw crust aesthetic remains undimmed.  However, from the sledgehammer grooves of Hidden Ruler (Kang Sheng) and Passion Play to the venomous riffs that define Regime Forces and Preach To The Converted, the doom-laden riffage is somehow even more muscular in its execution.

The latter is exemplified by the two instrumental tracks that close out each side.  P.B.T.D entwines a lone southern-tinged guitar with bird song, while the finale, H.D. IV – Laika’s Lament, sees haunting electronics ambiently soothe and stab with unease in equal measure.  A bleakly triumphant return.

‘Un niño ve la cruz, En la arena, Flores secas, Madera sin pena, Quien murio aquí? Pregunta al viento’ (Cruces) / ‘A child sees the cross, In the sand, Withered flowers, Wood without sorrow, Who died here? He asks the wind’ (Crosses)

Although now based in Austin, Mujeres Podridas (Rotten Women), who feature members of Wiccans and Nosferatu, were born in the Rio Grande Valley that runs along the southernmost stretch of the Mexico-Texas border.  Sangre Y Sol (Blood And Sun), the band’s second full-length and follow up to 2021’s Muerte En Paraíso (Death In Paradise), continues to be shaped by the violence, poverty, and intolerance that stalk the region.

Yet, while the band’s lyrical concerns are indelibly shaped by this lived experience, their sound is one rooted much more in the traditions of Southern California punk.  Propulsive rhythms and infectious surf-tinged guitars form the tightly crafted bedrock, although laced with a sombre melodicism that belies the album’s darker themes.  These elements are matched with strident Spanish vocals courtesy of Dru Molina (formerly of Criatures and Kurrakä), whose delivery is a touch more restrained than on those earlier projects, which affords space for plenty of catchily melodic hooks.

Kicking off an album with an instrumental always seems a courageous move, but it works perfectly with opener Aqua Peligrosa (Dangerous Water), the brightly freewheeling solos interwoven with samples from the region’s history of state violence and disenfranchisement.  The scene now set, the momentum never sags for even a moment from the serpentine leads of Sol (Sun) to the surging urgency of El Río Grande, and then from the swelling melancholy of Cruces to the more introspective Ovni II (UFO II).

The self-titled debut album from Calgary art-punks Parisian Orgy lands with a healthy dose of weird and wonderful invention together with a keen ear for melodies that you just can’t shake.

Parisian Orgy began life as a solo project in the late 2010s and have since evolved into a five-piece collective.  Their self-titled debut album opens with the discordant Bubbling Boy, followed by a cover of Four Boys by early 1980s’ Parisian new wavers Tokow Boys.  By this point, I already knew not to expect matters to follow anything like a linear path, but that is probably just about all that I did correctly anticipate.

The base elements are pretty consistent – strummed guitars, limber rhythms, skittering synths, jarring toy horns, and xylophones.  However, Parisian Orgy consistently morph and twist them into the most unexpected of shapes, some frenetic, others altogether more languid, while the yelping vocals and their repetitive mantras conjure up tales of the absurd.

The key to the album’s impact is that everything fizzes with an organic, improvisational energy that skips without a care past the forced wilfulness that can sometimes bedevil more experimental projects.   The mouth organ (I think) fuelled languor of Jazz Song For Shrimp, the jauntily escalating Come Pretty Pump Sleep, and the pulsing bass line and soaring ‘la, la, las’ of  Belly Button Trap Door each land with a vibrant fervour.

‘Plastico mi cuerpo, Plastico y metales perados, Mi cuerpo es plastic’ / ‘My body is plastic, plastic and heavy metals, my body is plastic’ (Barbie Terminator)

Abism’s debut album, 2023, was a lesson in the power of doing the basics exceptionally well.  And this EP sees the New York band, who include members of Fairytale and Dawn Of The Humans, continue to place an unwavering emphasis on these core fundamentals.  Scraping, fuzzed guitars and thumping pogo rhythms lock into a relentless groove, while the fiercely rasping Spanish vocals grapple with the horrors inflicted on Gaza, the paramilitary violence of ICE, and a world locked into patterns of entrenched injustice.

Yet, as the 7-inch evolves, Abism begin to flex just a little, without compromising their mesmerising velocity, as flares of fuzzed out, almost seventies’ rock melodicism add an unexpected new dimension to the onslaught. Each of the five tracks slams home with impressive force.  Personal highlights are the melodically scampering leads of Cuantas Niños? (How Man Children?), the blistering riff that propels (Si) No Hay Paz ([Yes] There Is No Peace), and the wigged-out swing of Mentalidad Televisiva (Television Mentality).  Primitive hardcore delivered with no little panache.

‘A different setting, The same scene, Purpose of life, What does it all mean? Nothing, Work, buy, consume, die, A pill a day to conceal the lie’ (Nothing)

Beyond Recognition is the debut six-track 7-inch from Washington DC’s Laughing Corpse, who feature members from Genocide Pact, Glitterer, and Red Death among others.  Yet this roll call is little guide to the darkly dissonant, bleakly nihilistic hardcore that we are treated to here as the desperation drenched vocals wallow in the isolation and defeat of the daily treadmill we allow to ensnare us.

It is also an EP that sees the band become progressively more expansive, not say to say utterly unhinged, as it develops.  Side one kicks off with the rampaging Endless Game and locks into a fiercely surging battery from there, driven by some surprisingly clean, killer bass lines.  With this base established, the flip side becomes altogether more unpredictable as the band sweep from the swirling muscularity of Nothing to the bludgeoning, squalling Chapter 7 with a frenzied abandon.

‘Regress, Stretched thin across a broken frame, Regress, We wager dreams in a rigged game, Is there anything more than just to survive?’ (Progress)

Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, and featuring members of Voight Kampf and Skemäta, DE()T return with a 7-inch follow up to their 2024 debut album, Think Of Your Future.  They continue to revel in fashioning disconcertingly jolting, off kilter post-punk.  Shards of guitar are interwoven with spaced out swells of synth, underpinned by chunky bass lines, and burlier than anticipated percussion.

Meanwhile, the laconically drawled vocals hover somewhere between mischievous and disdainful detachment.  They are born of that moment when you realise that your more youthful optimism may have been misplaced and that things don’t necessarily have to get better.  In fact, the converse is often more likely to be true.  These satisfyingly offbeat charms land with particular relish on the infectiously despondent Progress and the assertively pulsing title track.

‘They are the suits and vultures, The ones buying the streets, Leaving people on their own and, Flipping our lives for hotel suites…They build their wealth on despair, While we struggle to just breath the air’ (Housing Game)

Bilbao’s Yunk serve up four tracks that brim with intriguing contradictions, yet they emerge as an intoxicating, cohesive whole.  Fuzzed out shoegaze and a chiming dream pop sensibility are ferociously distilled through a grittily anthemic melodic punk lens to startling effect.  The result is a an almost euphoric reverie that is as grounded as it is dreamy, as combative as it is hopeful.

In a similar vein, the hazily upbeat atmosphere belies rather more sombre lyrical themes.  Rousing calls for housing justice and for collective community action to stymie the rise of the far-right form the bedrock, as well as an ode to the cleansing physicality of pit, while calling out those who choose to abuse it.

And while richly detailed, the immediacy of the tracks is vibrantly striking.  I found myself belting out the soaring choruses to the opening two tracks, Our Way and Leave Me Alone, on my first listen.  But that proved nothing compared the heart swelling peaks of Unity! before the shimmering, melancholy laced closer Housing Game brings proceedings to a stirring climax.  This has rather put a spring in my step and that, if we’re honest, is no bad thing during this rather bleak January.

‘Their riches come from exploitation, Prosperity from international subjugation, Yet their claims to greatness, Are based on a myth of isolation’ (Empire’s Deceit)

The feral, snapping jaws of the cover art are drawn from a graphic novel that charts the story of escaped 19^th century slaves in Brazil.  It vividly primes expectations for this debut 7-inch, both musically and thematically.

Featuring as they do members of both Catharsis and Point Of No Return, it comes as little surprise that North Carolina’s From Below favour darkly atmospheric metallic hardcore.  However, while nods to both can be found, having a solitary vocalist, as opposed to Point Of No Return’s trio, and leaning more into rapid-fire d-beat and 1980s’ USHC rhythms than the more crust inspired influences of Catharsis, ensure that the dynamics of their sound evolve rather differently.

The urgently roared vocals alternate between English and Portuguese as the three tracks examine the rationalities that have justified the use of nuclear weapons (Teratomachia) and the brutal legacies of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and South America (Feitoria / Factory).  My personal highlight is, perhaps, the venomously surging Empire’s Deceit as it pulls together the threads that see overseas imperialism fuel domestic intolerance.

‘Nobody is asking for much, Survival is just an afterthought to those people, It’s mating season for the worst of human kind, I was born right into an ocean full of shit’ (IDGAG)

Gucked Up is the debut album from Guck, an abrasive fusion of electronic punk and noise rock influences.  Darkly pulsing electronics, slabs of discordant riffage, squalling melodies, and industrial inclined rhythms are woven into an unyielding battery that flits seamlessly between the innately danceable and the ineffably heavy.  And while this onslaught restlessly convulses with chaotic impulses, Guck’s compositions retain a clear-eyed coherency – even as each track jerks and contorts, they never lose shape nor momentum amid the dissonant experimentation.

The higher pitched atonality of the harshly nasal vocals provides a perfect counterpoint to the ever present, menacingly pulsating bottom-end.  They mutate from rhythmic tirades to harrowing screams, and from desperation drenched roars to sardonic taunts with a deliciously unhinged vigour.  The lyrics explore themes of socio-economic inequality, the relentless militarisation of society, and climatic breakdown through the lens of living in Los Angeles, a city perpetually mired between mythical imaginaries and much harsher daily realities.

From the ominous swells of the title track opener to the bone shuddering grooves of GUBAR, and from the surging agitations of Blue Collar Crime to the contagiously throbbing dance rhythms of IDGAG , the intensity is utterly unwavering.

‘Your life: traded like currency, Your love: burned up like gasoline, Manufacture need, Expedite receipt, Few can take part in the dream, built with stolen blood’ (Futurerock)

As hardcore punk continues to morph and reformulate itself into new shapes, it can sometimes be easy to forget the importance of base principals.  This is an accusation that could never be levelled at San Diego’s Negative Blast.  Theirs is a sound that positively revels in these essentials – the spit, the snap, the sheer velocity are all apparent in gratifying abundance.

Destroy Myself For Fun! is the band’s second album, following on from their 2023 debut, Echo Planet, and their split EP with Sweat from the same year.  Each of the eight tracks is a tensely coiled eruption.  Full, muscular guitars are underpinned by a propulsively limber rhythm section that imbues proceedings with an unashamed rock’n’roll swagger.  Their grip on the anchoring tenets is formidable and this, in turn, affords them the scope to assuredly flex their more inventive instincts.  From the woozy, sludge fuelled breakdown that defines the bruising Nuwage to the staccato stomp of Denial, by way of the darkly melancholic melody woven through Futurerock, the energy is never less than invigorating.

Meanwhile, the snarled vocals animate the lived experience of immigrant communities, both new and established, in the US in the context of the hostile domestic environment and the volatile cocktail of complicity and adventurism currently shaping the country’s position in the world.  This also inspires a parallel theme of working to maintain personal authenticity, both as an American from the emigrant diaspora, and simply as an individual, in the face of the polarising excesses and ceaseless distractions of surveillance capitalism.

‘Did you wish this for me, A limited square frame, Turned inside, I do what I want, I seek what I have’ (Legacy)

Maraudeur return in typically inventive style with their third album, Flaschenträger (Bottle Carrier), and follow-up to 2021’s Puissance 4 (Power Of 4).  Having previously been based in Geneva and Leipzig, the band are now spread throughout Switzerland, France, and Germany as well as having expanded to a six-piece.

What hasn’t changed though is the band’s relish for playfully detached, resolutely stripped back art-punk.  However, whereas Puissance 4 was primarily built around motorik beats and pulsing bass lines, Flaschenträger offers a somewhat more eclectic palette.  Indeed, the opening side is even more loosely assembled than expected, with tracks such as EC Blah. Blah and La Jaguar revelling in their deconstructed austerity.  Flesh is incrementally draped over these gyrating bones as the album progresses.

The flip side sees the song structures become a little tighter and the guitars a touch more more assertive within the mix.   Similarly, the vocals, alternating between French and English, evolve from off-kilter semi-spoken to more melodically layered expressions as they toy with everything from picnics in sunny car parks and controlling relationships to giant River Rhône catfish as allegory for a world being gaslit as it plunges into the abyss.  This blend lands to particular effect on the tautly restrained Clever Sneaker, the wryly shimmering Syncope, and the haunting unfurling of (Legacy).

‘We’re told the struggle is ours alone, Systemic failures, Sold as personal failure, Isolation, Maintains the system, And if we buy the lies, They become the truth’ (The Lie Becomes The Truth)

The ideas that fuel The Truth Of Impermanence act as a powerful antidote to that most powerful of untruths – that there is no alternative, the now is eternal.  Political hegemony relies on removing people’s hope.  Killing at birth the very notion that anything better is possible.  And at times like this, when the direction of travel feels bleakly inevitable, when coherent opposition feels suffocated, that hope is the very kernel of resistance.

Hailing from New York, REDS were initially active in the mid-noughties, releasing their debut album Is: Mean, before heading in their separation directions.  Reforming in 2023, and with a revamped rhythm section, The Truth Of Impermanence was born.  The band continue to hone tautly clean, high energy emotional hardcore, but it is equally clear that it is fired by vehemently renewed conviction.

As they sweep from the searing opener, The Lie Becomes The Truth, to the ferociously catchy closer, The Body, by way of the venomous oscillations of Wounds and dissonant slow burn build of Slow Decay, the intensity is deftly layered.  It evokes a sense of the chaos tinged tension of Hot Cross fusing with the reflective expressions of Fugazi, before being distilled down to its very essence.

The vocal performance, equal parts raw velocity and richly emotional detailing, is the perfect counterpoint.  It builds powerful connections between systematic misinformation, dehumanising narratives, and bodily autonomy as well as the power of DIY hardcore to forge much needed community in the face of such adversity.

‘Battling giants and talking shit, To watch the sun come up, It lives somewhere, Like a bag of fun dip, to be harvested when necessary’ (Warriors)

Harrowgate is an album about grief. An emotion that even once experienced is almost impossible to describe.  A pain beyond words that time does not heal. It may mute the rawest edges, but the shadow of loss still stalks us, ready to pounce at the most unexpected of provocations.  Yet those same memories can also serve as a positive force – one of both remembrance and inspiration, one that roots us and helps propels us forward.

Disappearances largely comprise members of two fine Philadelphia bands from the mid-noughties, Dying and Less Life (their 2013 split album was an absolute corker).  This pedigree shines through in abundance on this, their debut album, although intriguingly they actually recorded their first demo together nearly a decade ago.

This is darkly metallic, crust leaning hardcore that blends furious blast beat eruptions with slabs of menacing groove and lacerating squalls of mournfully dissonant melody.  Meanwhile, the harrowing, desperation fuelled roared vocals unpick the consequences of grief in its myriad of forms – the death of loved ones, the fracturing of community, the loss of place, and the aftermath of trauma.

The tautly constructed highlights slam home with impressive regularity.  The bruising climatic breakdown to Collapse.  The jagged, convulsing melancholy of Vulnerability Hangover.  The bleakly contagious Shame Trailer.  The bone shuddering bass lines of White Phosphorous.  What emerges is an emotionally uncompromising yet undeniably rewarding statement.

‘Collective unreason, Now is the season, Our eyes are swelled shut, With our mouths opened up, We are toxic, infected, Immorally subjected’ (Am I Seeing This Clearly?)

Kirkby Kiss are firmly rooted in the traditions of mid-1990s’ metallic hardcore – menacingly discordant guitar, harshly roared vocals, ominous spoken word.  The band’s marshalling of these elements is ever more assured on this, their second album, Four Color Black, and follow up to 2022’s debut, It’s Gonna Cost You.  The ensuing fluidity enables the New Jersey band to conjure a fierce balance between complexity and immediacy, ratcheting tension and brutal realisation.

And while call backs to the pioneers of the sound are to be found – flashes of Deadguy, whispers of Botch – what emerges is a thoroughly distinctive take.  The equal billing afforded to the rhythm section ensures an unexpected sense of space and a notably limber swagger to proceedings, while the dissonant flares of sombre melody inject an unwavering emotional intensity. This intensity is further reflected in a lyrical exploration of the vulnerabilities that collectively connect us in a world ever more predicated on individual self-interest.

From the cathartic tension of You And Me to the infectiously bruising title track, by way of the savage oscillations and squalling violin of Come Out And Play, the onslaught is as remorseless as it is vividly detailed.  Am I Seeing This Clearly?, a collaboration with Jeff Janiak and JP Parsons of False Fed, provides a suitably stirring climax, before a hidden cover of Born Again’s Well Fed Fuck erupts into belated life.

This split 12-inch from Spares and Treasure Pains sees both bands draw on shared inspirations, before taking their emotionally charged post-hardcore in distinctive directions.

‘A change is gonna come, That’s what they all say, White light’ll burst on through, On the darkest day, Don’t think I believe it’ (New Indignities)

Hailing from Portland, Spares released their self-titled debut 12-inch in early 2025 and closed the year with this split.  On these two tracks, the band continue to draw on influences from 1990s’ San Diego post-hardcore that they imbue with their own darkly reflective atmosphere as the deeply clean sung vocals contemplate the weight of a world designed to stifle hope and smother decency.  The broodingly expansive Joke fuses chiming motif melodies with a lurking muscularity and limber rhythms to build to its euphorically layered climax, while New Indignities shapes those same elements into an altogether more urgent expression.

‘Who broke my energy? Who shook the way I live? Took my autonomy, Got nothing left to give’ (Left To Give)

The same angst at this stripping of our humanity similarly fuels the two contributions from Treasure Pains on this, their debut release.  While they call upon elements of the same shared San Diego angularity, the North Carolina band favour a more agitated, tightly crafted interpretation.  Both Left To Give and Strike are high octane eruptions that bristle with a desperate frustration yet also, in equal measure, an undeniably infectious melodic melancholy.  It would take a particularly deadened heart to not join in the rousing ‘Ooh’ fuelled finale to Strike.

‘From the master’s deft hand, We are fed horrid remains, In the master’s tight grip, We will remain’ (Reaper)

Roanoke, Virginia’s Ex Parents are back with a new four-track EP, Failure, following on from their 2023 self-titled debut album.  The trio’s sound is one grounded in the very fundamentals of 1980s’ USHC.  And such is their rigorously tight grip on these base elements of blistering speed and raw aggression that it affords them the scope to lean into some intriguingly layered flourishes.  Meanwhile, the rasping vocals explore the damaging learned behaviours that feed our own complicity in an economic system designed to divide and atomise.

The title track kicks off proceedings in rampaging style, before Reaper fuses a martial anarcho-punk stomp with a burly group vocal finale.  The rather more loose limbed When The Hook Sets is then laced with an almost fuzzed out melodicism, before the closer Dimwit bristles with a lean garage punk intensity.  Proof, if it were needed, that no nonsense does not mean no invention.

‘El deseo banal del progreso, glorifica la tecnologia como dios, perseverente camino para erigir un inevitable, inevitable undo infértil’ (Progreso Reccionario) / ‘The banal desire for progress glorifies technology as a god, a persistent path to erecting an inevitable, inevitable barren world’ (Reactionary Progress)

The bold artwork to Choque Asimétrico (Asymmetric Shock) incisively primes expectations.  A security wall morphs into stomping paramilitaries as the brutal learnings from wars of occupation boomerang home to militarise civic life.   They march past emaciated, faceless figures cowering in the aftermath of their overseas violence and in the shadow of the wall itself.  Beyond this wall, the architecture of security and capital soars through the polluted skies.  A world reborn as prison, a fortress to sow fear, and to harvest profit.

Bogotá’s Unidad Ideológica (Ideological Unity) return with their second album, and follow-up to 2021’s self-titled debut.  Featuring as they do members of Alambrada and Muro, the sheer unbridled venom of their metallic d-beat onslaught comes as little surprise.  This pedigree also ensures that, amid the unyielding velocity, their raw barrage is a deftly dynamic and astutely layered one.

From the surging groove of Huir (Flee) to the thrashing barbarity of Colapso Esotérico (Esoteric Collapse), and from the discordantly squalling melodicism of Posthumanista (Posthumanist) to the urgent rhythmic fury of the closer Prisión [Sur] Global (Prison [South] Global), the intensity is as unforgiving as it is vividly detailed.  Meanwhile, the desperation-soaked vocals pay witness to the relentless quelling of the human spirit at the hands of surveillance capitalism, techno-feudalism, and the remorseless exploitation of the marginalised.

‘We slouch on our thrones, etched in stone, Last breaths screaming, A nocturne of apathy’ (The Emptiness Of All Things)

‘It is about not giving up the ghost – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us’ (Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life).  The concept of hauntology has long informed the music of Massa Nera (Black Mass) – the refusal to settle for the financialised hegemony of our times, not to take refuge in the melancholy of nostalgia, but rather to animate the understanding that alternative futures can be born.

It is once again a powerful presence in shaping The Emptiness Of All Things, one that examines the neoliberal ‘common sense’ that locks us into a cycle of growing inequality, entrenched militarisation, climatic breakdown, and technological delusion.  Indeed, the title itself is an allusion to the fact that what seems eternal is, in fact, contingent on our collective acceptance.

The Emptiness Of All Things is the New Jersey band’s third full-length and follow-up to last year’s split album with Quiet Fear, Quatro Vientos // Cincos Soles (Four Winds, Five Suns). At the heart of their searingly intense emotional hardcore is an exploration of the tensions between discordant fury and dissonant reflection, barely restrained chaos and rigorous atmospheric restraint, and the textures that bridge these competing dynamics.

And from the savagely percussive opening of A Body, this tension produces a truly visceral onslaught that roils restlessly, and rarely as anticipated, between harsh aggression and haunting melody.  The frantic incantation of ‘I’ll save us’ during Pèlerin (Pilgrim).  The fiercely rhythmic escalation of Mechanical Sunrise.  The bleakly pulsing industrial climax to Lavender.  The spectral meditation of the closing New Animism.  Massa Nera have harnessed their sonic experimentation, narrative exposition, and no little black humour (‘We’ll cruise the streets in electric cars, with the wind in our hair’ [Mechanical Sunrise]), to deliver an album of strikingly realised ambition.

‘Kneeling on the pavement, Years can run around us while we sink or swim, A nervous declaration, A flower for the ages, Waiting to be picked’ (Glass Bells)

Never Paradise is the debut album from Philadelphia’s Annie Achron.  Calling upon the base elements of early 1980s’ dark wave, she realises a deft melding of warmly pulsating synths, crisply looping percussion, and ethereal vocals.

This is not an album of grand statements and attention seeking flamboyance.  Rather it is propelled by a clear sense of space and gentle, subtle shifts in tone.  The stark palette elicits a strangely comforting reverie, intriguingly one that is decidedly more human than electronic in texture.  It bewitchingly swirls around you like a delicate mist, luring you ever more deeply into its embrace, both playful yet fundamentally austere.

The enigmatically intoned vocals lead roughly half the tracks, with the jauntily angular title track and the haunting chants of the darkly throbbing O. Magnus proving particular highlights.  Yet, the instrumental tracks inspire equally rich interest, not least D’en Robador (Of A Thief) and Out Of The Myst, which are both enticingly primed by sinuous swells of electronic piano.  Never Paradise proves a thoroughly evocative journey.

‘The ceiling is peeling, Is peeling, And we’re both disappearing, Paint chips in my hair like, Fallen Stars, fallen stars’ (Paints Peeling)

Distortion is something beautiful.  That said, one of the undoubted pleasures derived from those bands that chose to shed its delights, is that the vivid integrity of every moving part of their sound that is revealed by its absence.  The bristling, no wave accented punk of Philadelphia’s Eraser on their debut album, Hideout, is a perfect example.

Precise motorik beats and thrumming bass lines form the backbone, while jagged shards of guitar and tantalisingly just short of jarring synths seem unsure of whether to wrestle or collaborate with one another.  What emerges is both anxiously claustrophobic and abrasively confrontational, yet also imbued with a tautly coiled, ineffably danceable energy that draws on the same spikily synth fuelled fervour as Es and Hekátē.

The emotionally cold, disdainfully detached vocals provide an engagingly insidious counterpoint as they sharply deconstruct everything from social platitudes to predatory behaviours and the horrors of Gaza.  The agitated oscillations of Paints Peeling and the deliciously unhinged Dinner Roll are my personal highlights.

‘Kingdom built where nothing grows, Blade rusts as I’m filled with shame, The mirror won’t speak, But knows my name’ (Silk & Sodom)

As well as the usual South London avian stalwarts of swaggering crows and sharp-eyed magpies, we’re blessed in our patch with a totally mental flock of parakeets – their raucously endless chatter brightens even the drabbest of the days.  So, as short hand renderings for our impending doom go, A Garden Without Birds pretty much nails it for me.

This is Ruined Virtue’s debut 7-inch and these four tracks follow up their self-titled demo from last year.  The Sheffield band continue to hone a sound drawing inspiration from late 1980s’ UK metallic crust punk, before injecting a rhythmic fury akin to more contemporary New York influences, in the vein of say Warthog, and then leavening the grit and the grime with soaring flares of NWOBHM accented melody.

Meanwhile, the filthily roared vocals conjure a bleakly allegorical depiction rooted in images of flesh and decay, bone and soil to evoke the economic system that is remorselessly cannibalising both people and planet for the benefit of the gilded few.  And from the barrelling brawn of Long Pig to the choppy grooves of Ghoul 96, and then from the crushing martial breakdown that closes Silk & Sodom to the bristling fury of the title track, the desperation of our baleful future is mercilessly laid bare.