‘Hair back, use the heat, crossed legs, erase the pink, pain is in fashion, no sense of self is always in fashion’ (Playing Puppet)

Musical Chairs is Artificial Go’s second album and sees the Cincinnati band began to inventively expand the skeletal, angular art-punk of last year’s debut, Hopscotch Fever.  The pacing is a touch more mellow, the instrumentation a little lusher as the band conjure an atmosphere that evokes a notably welcoming warmth, mirroring the band’s own growing self-confidence.  This increased expansiveness sees their trademark bright, scratchy guitars, snappily crisp rhythm section, and catchily understated choruses layered with flourishes of acoustic guitar, saxophone, and looping electronics.

Importantly, however, the off-kilter energy and absurdist imagery that propelled their earlier release is still evident in abundance.  Angie Willcutt’s arrestingly mannered, austerely melodic vocals conjure another set of sharply observed vignettes exploring both life’s darker elements alongside those of a lighter hue.  Playing Puppet dissects misogynistic expectations and Tightrope Walker our frequently distorted relationship with the animal world, while Circles playfully revels in dog breed comparisons and Red Convertible in the desire for just that, but only a red one mind.  The band save their most unexpected twist for the end, closing out on the otherworldly rhythms of Sky Burial.

‘Slash welfare, Who to call, Pregnant and alone, Potemkin village, no, no home, She’s a human dog, Rearing her chainsaw child’ (Lillibilly)

Philadelphia’s Kilynn Lunsford has been involved in experimental DIY punk – most notably, perhaps, in the guise of Taiwan Housing Project – for some twenty years.  She released her first album under her own name, Custodians Of Human Succession, in 2022 and is now back with the captivating follow-up, Promiscuous Genes.

The album’s starting point is rooted in 1980s’ post-punk, an inspiration that is then deftly refashioned in Kilynn’s inimitable style.  She calls upon dissonant dance beats, flaring noise punk, and a rich pop sensibility to hone a sound that is catchily alluring and impetuously unpredictable in equal measure.

The finishing touch is, of course, Kilynn’s own mercurially shapeshifting vocals.  At differing times, she taunts, then comforts, ominously menaces, then consoles.  Shaped by her experiences as a healthcare union organiser, her darkly surreal stream of consciousness unpicks the governing rationality that seeks to excuse and justify, rather than challenge, socio-economic inequality.

Sweeping from the powerfully ‘Slithering on the ground’ repetition of My Amphibian Face to the unsettling trip hop of the title track, and then from the thumping euphoric beats of Gateway To Hell to the eerily compelling Let’s Eat, the only thing you can be sure of is that you won’t guess quite where you’re going next.  But you will almost certainly rather like it.

‘And she lets them drown, a path that only fools may go, and leads with hanging fruit so low, she lets us weave our deadened web, in the middle of her crown’ (The Witch)

I must confess that this my first encounter with Lung and I’m not sure anything could have quite prepared me for the sheer velocity and invention that the Cincinnati duo unleash on this their fifth album, The Swankeeper.  Structurally, their sound is a fusion of noise punk and elements of progressive post-hardcore.  Yet remarkably the fearsome battery that ensues is delivered by the simple partnering of cello and drums.

The cello is an absolute revelation.  Forced through guitar distortion pedals, you can’t help but imagine a vast, pulsing bank of amps as it sweeps from doom-laden slabs of riffage to more delicately dancing melodic interludes.  The drums match this repertoire step for step, all pounding fury before subsiding into more fluidly limber patterns as demanded.

The arch, darkly melancholic vocals add a further dramatic dimension.  Cellist Kate Wakefield is also a classically trained opera singer, which is apparent from the sheer power of her delivery.  The flourishes where she leans into this operatic background more avowedly, do take a moment or two to acclimatise to, but once you do there’s no denying the further emotional heft they imbue.

From the stark mantra of ‘You are worth the money’ (The Money) to the haunting refrain of ‘No, I won’t be caught burning flowers on your grave’ (The Magician), by way of the rhythmic fury of Fire Spell, this is an album that never ceases to grab your attention.  The highlight is, perhaps, the venomous cello riff that defines Sunshine’s Over – the moment that the drums drop out to leave just the cello and a mournfully matching whistle is absolutely banging.

‘A crushing education, Swallowed by the floor, Dying from the shame, A taste of what you need’ (Settle Down)

Hailing from Long Beach, Self Improvement return with their second full-length and follow-up to 2022’s Visible Damage.  And what a delightfully understated, insidiously atmospheric treat it is.  The crisply punchy drums resist any temptation to overplay, while locking in with the tautly resonant, darkly danceable bass lines.  Meanwhile, the guitar weaves its own independent yet equally restrained patterns, tensely angular and melodically serpentine.  Flares of electronics inject a further layer of intriguing texture.  This precisely constructed palette, sparsely coloured yet richly detailed, proves the perfect tableau for the evocatively virtuoso vocals of Jett Witchalls.

The default mode is one of detached, sardonic semi-spoken disdain that morphs with impressive dexterity from the stridently forceful to the hazily ethereal and then the playfully mocking without breaking stride.  This vocal fluidity, with its distinctive English cadence, marries with one of the album’s core themes as Settle Down, Dissolved, and Change My Mind skewer the preordained roles forced on women by social convention, before turning to the cultural polarisation and hollowing out inflicted on us all by technology on Scam and Just Like Me.  This is an album that eschews grand statements in favour of a subtle, enticing finesse, and it is all the more hypnotically persuasive for it.

‘No chance of reconciliation, No room to grieve, In life we are promised only one thing, Catastrophe to suffer regardless’ (In Life…)

Wicked Dream is the debut 7-inch from Richmond, Virginia’s Cicada, who feature members of the equally incendiary Black Button, and to claim that it is an intense ride would be something of an understatement.  This is savagely dense, intrinsically sinister hardcore.  It literally seethes with ideas that flare fleetingly before we are plunged back into the roiling discordance.

Yet at no time does this sound like a band simply throwing ideas around chaotically.  Such is the band’s taut control that there is always a sense of a sound that, for all of its writhing inventiveness, is firmly anchored to deliver truly venomous velocity.  The harshly grunted vocals are drenched in dark desperation at lives evolving without purpose, fuelled by relentless consumption and atomised isolation.

The highlights come thick and fast as the band unleash nine tracks in as many minutes.   The EP sweeps from the wild, psychedelia-tinged opener Epiphany to the martial squall of In Life…, while the metallic fury of Much Worse segues into the hauntingly melodic intro to the brutal stomp of the title track, before dissolving into the frenzied free for all of closer Desperation Ceremony.  The striking, darkly unsettling artwork seals the deal.

‘No hay hogar, No hay salvacion, No hay seguridad, No conozro lo sagrado, Muerte en todo lado’ (Putrefaxion) / ‘There is no home, There is no salvation, There is no security, I do not know the sacred, Death is everywhere’ (Rotten)

Gritos Norterño (Northern Cries) is the debut album from Destruxion Amerika, a band that calls on the musicianship of members of the New York triumvirate of Kaleidoscope, Straw Man Army, and Tower 7, together with vocals from the band’s originator, also of Altar Of Eden and Nosferatu.

The drawled Spanish vocals conjure an atmosphere that brims with urgent desperation yet that is also concurrently mired in languid despondency, a compelling tension matched by the wider just shy of lo-fi battery.  The guitars are a fiercely lean fuzz.  This allows the swinging bass lines to punch through with a taut resonance in partnership with the loosely limber drums.  It is a blend perfectly embodied by the shimmering fury of Ciclos (Cycles), the bleakly infectious Fosa Comun (Mass Grave), and the enticingly choppy Humillados, No (Humiliated, No).

The result is as mesmerising as it is frenetic, burning with a sense of powerlessness and frustration at the dehumanising economics, hollowed out media, and the state sanctioned violence of an increasingly authoritarian US government.  It bleakly evokes a sense of a society rotting from the inside out, knowingly nurturing the roots of its own demise, relentlessly accelerating the path to its own self-destruction.

‘Not here to talk, Not backing down, Indignant screams for purity, Dreaming of a world that never was, Restore tradition, Enforce division, Thrashing for progress undone’ (Never Going Back)

Milwaukee’s Innuendo make their vinyl debut in rollicking style with Peace & Love.  Taking cues from early 1980’s hardcore and injecting them with both a raucous rock’n’roll vitality and an uncompromising sincerity, they deliver a thoroughly refreshing slap to the senses.

The dirt-toned guitar is languorously delivered, mid-paced strumming and flaring blues infused solos setting the tone of raw infectious hardcore.  It is instinctually contagious without ever veering into the actively anthemic, as the rasping vocals and swaggering rhythm section lock-in with ferocious abandon.  The barrelling Just Talk and wildly escalating Stuck are personal stand outs.

Lyrically, the album grapples with a society that is looting itself in its determination to sate the demands of capital – economic exploitation (Suffer For Peace), scapegoating the already marginalised (Poison Pill), and sowing the seeds of division to distract from its own rapacious greed (Finding Death).  It closes with Never Going Back, a searing denunciation of the reactionary yearning to turn the clocks back to some rose-tinted past rather than confronting the real causes of our current malaise.

‘As I sit with my dog, I can hear your crunchy riffs ringing in my ears, That Traynor amp will always echo across Ketch Harbour my friend, And your smile will always shine through the grey’ (Ketch Harbour)

Mutated Void first came into view in 2022 when releasing both their debut LP, Roses Are Forever, and the follow-up EP, Slash The Altar, almost on top of one another.   The Halifax, Nova Scotia band have now expanded to a foursome, but very little else has changed.  This for the avoidance of a doubt is a very good thing.

This is blown out, very lo-fi crust hardcore punk forced through the harrowing lens of the rawest black metal. Tarnished sees the band unleash ten further filthy blasts and the song structures writhe and morph with an unexpected virtuosity despite their relative brevity.  Meanwhile, the vicious blackened vocals explore themes of mental isolation, social exclusion, and police violence.

That said, there are also signs evolution lurking amid the shadows.  During the two more expansive tracks at nearly two minutes, Abandoned and Ketch Harbour, they lock into an impressively intense groove.  The former even opens with a melodically squalling solo as heartfelt tribute is paid to fellow Halifax musician, Ben Brennan, following his recent death.

‘All I see is violence and bloodshed, Again and again, Death comes near, You want peace, Now there’s a price on your head’ (Peace By A Rope)

Hailing from Milwaukee, People Die is the debut full-length from Necron 9, following up a series of increasingly blistering demos over the past two years.  Their sound is one rooted in an almost atavistic rage, and it initially floors you with its all-engulfing intensity.  However, as you more fully immerse yourself, there is a satisfyingly engaging level of depth to keep drawing you back beyond its sheer lacerating rawness.

Rabidly catchy riffage comes thick and fast in combination with a rhythm section that stamps its mark with a reckless, swinging abandon.  Meanwhile, the feral grunted vocals unleash a violently primordial yowl against a society whose values have been remorselessly corroded by deeply entrenched social oppression and militarised violence.  As the album hurtles from the searing title track to the flaring melodicism of Flower Child, by way of the bouncing velocity of Not Me, this is a truly unhinged ride.

‘The voice is a spell, from a dying book, every day for 50 years, building fences, building walls, smothering flames, with the spit of historians, myths from the past, forms in the present’ (What Will Happen If We Stop?)

Olympia’s Fugitive Bubble return with their follow-up to last year’s Delusion.  Their agitated, high-octane punk feels even more fully realised on this their second album, as artfully chaotic as it is insidiously catchy.  The base elements of energetically layered dual vocalists, tautly jagged guitars, and swinging bass lines remain firmly in place, with the new drummer – Typhoid Mary of fellow Olympians Physique – injecting an inventively careering anarchic propulsion.

The album acerbically dissects the economic commodification of our lives, the criminalisation of poverty, and climatic catastrophe.  The convulsing opener, Parade Of Pissants, embodies this infectious blend of writhing musical contortion and vitriolic lyrical precision, setting a tone that rarely relents from the ferociously sinuous Failed Experiment to the bass fuelled Ego Drip, by way of the swaggering fervour of the title track.  There are also moments of meditative reflection amid the otherwise frenetic commotion, including the skeletal piano of Demodex In Situ (Parts I & II) and the shimmering instrumental closer Your Loyalty To The Flag Lies Beneath My Boot.

‘I’ve never felt that I’ve ever quite got it right, not even once, not at all’ (Columbo)

If ever a single line captured the emotional heart of an album, it is this.  The first full-length from Hubert Selby Junior Infants is an album bathed in a darkly fermenting realisation that the lifelong belief that if you do the right things, it pays off in the end, doesn’t necessarily hold true.  You may be more at ease with yourself, but life’s outcomes don’t change.  It is expressed not as disappointment as such, but rather a world-weary resignation that life isn’t, well, all that fair.

This follow-up to the Dublin band’s excellent 2024 debut EP, Have You Ever Seen A Crow…Or An Eel, sees their propulsive, grunge-tinged post-hardcore provide a muscular counterpoint to this dawning realisation – driving guitars and a notably limber rhythm section readily shift from locked-in grooves to more abrasive ruptures with fluid dexterity.  A blend that is compellingly captured on the swelling, oscillating Columbo and Build Me A Monster.

However, the defining energy is arguably courtesy of the bleakly evocative melodicism that shrouds the album and infuses the downhearted but by no means defeated vocals.  They emerge as a fractured, melodically poetic flow that is, perhaps, a nod to the writing of the novelist after who the band are named.  The result is a hypnotically powerful one yet also one in which the nagging thought that ‘Everyone loves a good bad decision ’til it’s time to clean the mess up’ (Dumb As An Ox) is rarely far from the surface.

‘Too numb to be ashamed, Too weak for exchange, Too much to find the start, Beginning at nowhere with no one to ask’ (Endxiety)

I still vividly remember first dropping the needle on Svffer’s 2014 debut album, Lies We Live, and being sent absolutely reeling by the intensity of its sonic violence.  It was a truly visceral braiding of emotional hardcore and powerviolence and one that ignited an equally devastating onslaught on their follow-up, Empathist, a year later.  Having toured that album extensively, including a savage performance at the now defunct The Unicorn in Camden, things went rather quiet from the Műnster band.  But Svffer are now back with a final EP, before they take their leave with a farewell run of shows in Germany this autumn.

Fiercely metallic riffage is laced with darkly dissonant melody, and while the rhythm section is rooted in blistering speed, it is also equally adept at segueing into swaggering breakdowns and brutal blast eruptions.  The vocals are, as always, rabidly harrowing as they challenge misogyny in a music scene that professes to enlightened and wider themes of self-doubt and anxiety in a society heavily conditioned to a particular view of what is ‘normal’ and what is not.  From the unhinged climatic fury of the opener In Harm(ony) to the discordantly melodic escalation of the closer Fear Of Missing, Eternity Moment serves as a fittingly venomous sign-off.

‘The words rolling about your head for years, The clay of your face withering, The well of your sorrow is untapped, Hearts are heavy barricades exploding’ (An Ode To Heavy Water)

Cinder Well is the musical incarnation of California-based multi-instrumentalist, Amelia Baker.  Her songwriting fuses together two contrasting yet interlinked musical traditions – DIY folk-punk and traditional Celtic folk music.  The former influence stems from Baker’s membership of the anarcho-punk folk collective, Black Raum.  The latter emerged from that band’s collaborations with Lankum, which sparked her to move to County Clare and immerse herself in the Irish folk community.

The result of these experimentations is a mournfully elemental, eerily atmospheric dark folk that deftly infuses traditional folk arrangements with a momentum and resonance more akin to the more melancholic expressions of hardcore punk in the vein of say Dawn Ray’d or Morrow.  I first came across Cinder Well through her third full-length, 2020’s No Summer, an album that inspired Contraszt Records to reissue both of her earlier albums on vinyl for the first time – initially, her second album, 2018’s The Unconscious Echo, and now, on its 10^th anniversary, her self-titled debut.

As you might anticipate, this debut is tightly stripped back.  The sombrely brittle acoustic guitar forms a lockstep partnership with Baker’s captivating vocals, as they segue from spectral whispers to more stridently melodic assertions.  Further texture is added by the roiling piano of the title track, while the fiddle raucously fires The Hyde Mansion / Lonesome John, before imbuing a rather more melancholic accent to Fallen.  It is, perhaps, though the hauntingly beautiful The Little Box, The Colour Of Heartache, that best captures the very essence of Cinder Well as it escalates to its fiercely emotional climax.

‘Angry when questioned, The status quo examined, It worked for them, Not you and I’ (Time Is Up)

Deny The Future is the debut four-track 7-inch from Minneapolis’ Shatter.  Their sound is one that is coloured by both Japanese hardcore and metallic crust inspirations.  Yet it primarily draws on the, perhaps, less favoured aspects of those influences, before the band add a few deft twists of their own.  The riffage is lean, tightly inventive and underpinned by a d-beat inclined rhythm section that in partnership creates an impressive, surging velocity.

This fierce battery is largely devoid of all but melodic flares, such as the explosive opening to Time Is Up. However, the urgent, rhythmically rasping vocals are prepared to carry a melody with a relish more akin to the anthemic power of NWOBHM.  This is particularly evident on the contagiously soaring opener, Up To You, as it tackles the thin veneer of corporate greenwashing. But it is also notably evident across the balance of the tracks as they focus on the entrenched entitlement and social conservatism that still distort society to the concerns and whims of prejudice.  A thoroughly distinctive EP.

‘Force fed dirt, Hollow agenda, Grinding your spirit, Until you surrender, Thrive on dependency, Cash in on tyranny, Stand on our backs, To perpetuate their oligarchy’ (World Order)

Headsplitters return with their second full-length, Curse Of Life, and follow-up to 2021’s EP, End Uniform Terror.  The New York trio continue to hone their hardcore punk in a way that is not overly indebted to any specific style but rather draws on 1980s’ US hardcore, raw punk, and d-beat influences, before refashioning them through a more metallic sensibility.

Given the band’s moniker, the primordial edge that propels the band should come as little surprise.  But this burliness can’t disguise the craft with which the album is constructed.  There is a lean muscularity to the thrash inclined riffage and a dissonant melodicism is subtly interwoven throughout.  The pounding rhythm section delivers a spry bounce to the battery, while the howling solos verge on the unhinged.

Meanwhile, the sneering, rasping vocals share the same thrash accent as the guitars as they acerbically deconstruct the sobering realities of modern-day America – oligarchal power, miltarised policing, entrenched economic inequality – while never losing sight of the need to resist and to shake free from the defeatism of perpetual exhaustion. From the surging Horrific Truth to the stomping Game Of Suffering, by way of the discordantly infectious Borrowed Time and the choppy fury of World Order, Headsplitters unleash a sound that is singularly their own.

Nisemono (Imposter) is the self-titled debut LP from a New York duo with a rich hardcore pedigree spanning Dollhouse, L.O.T.I.O.N, and Warthog among others.

In the guise of Nisemono, they savagely mould Japanese and Scandinavian hardcore influences into a punishing, groove fuelled onslaught.  There is a delicious clarity and fullness to the riffage as it is unleashed in wave upon relentless wave, before morphing into scorchingly melodic solos.  The cymbal awash drumming injects both a fierce propulsion, but also a satisfying suppleness, to the barrage.  The result is an intriguing balancing act between power, precision, and fluidity.

Meanwhile, the powerfully guttural vocals conjure images of a demon questioning their life choices after a particularly gruelling, and if they were honest, unfulfilling day of meting out torment and punishment.  This sense of tortured self-reflection is mirrored in the lyrical themes of frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety.  Personal highlights include the ferociously swaggering 酷い思い出 (Hidoi Omoide / Bad Memories) and the merciless intensity of 憎しみ (Nikushimi / Hatred).  The album also includes a rather natty silk-screened poster of the card playing skeleton from the cover art.

‘Ratings matter more than health, Sensationalism always sells, Career long mission to exploit, Will push her past the boiling point’ (Blood And Guts)

Drawing as they do on members from both the hardcore (Reversal Of Man, Warthog) and thrash metal (Cannibal Corpse, Municipal Waste) communities, it is, perhaps, little surprise that Heaven’s Gate deal in crossover thrash.  What does make you sit bolt upright though, is the sheer sledgehammer velocity of the execution.  Their sound is one that is rooted in a hardcore intensity that is then amplified with a commanding metallic velocity.  And as good as their 2023 self-titled debut EP was, Tales From A Blistering Paradise is the sound of a band assuredly hitting their stride.

From the searing opener Frail Mary (Full Of Glass), with its absolutely crushing climatic breakdown, to the sludge mired fury of the closer Freedom Square, there is not even a hint of respite.  Contagiously buzzsaw riffage, swinging rhythms, and brutal blast beat eruptions are blended into a visceral yet fiercely taut maelstrom.  The rhythmically roared vocals, meanwhile, draw on the rich and frequently bizarre history of their home state of Florida.  These real-life stories are used to animate themes of corruption, violence, and environmental degradation, conjuring images of the novels of Carl Hiaasen darkly mutating into life to their very own hardcore soundtrack.

‘Artificial freedom, Numb like never before, Got your programmed mindset, No free will anymore’ (Deserted Centuries)

During the course of 2022, 偏執症者 Paranoid released a series of four two-track 7-inch EPs, to celebrate the band’s 10^th anniversary and to reflect the Swedish trio’s desire at the time to release their music more spontaneously, without the more rigorous demands of entering the studio to record a full-length album.  Beach Impediment have now done everyone the tremendous service of collating these EPs into a single full-length album.

Paranoid have always been a band to draw on influences from across the hardcore punk spectrum, before sculpting them into their own abrasively distinctive sound.  The constant threads are the thrash fuelled guitars, pounding d-beat rhythms, and galloping crust propulsion that are then imbued in equal measure, with a fiercely combative punk attitude and a notable NWOBHM sense of melodic drama.

The fact that the original EPs were each recorded in close proximity to one another ensures a real sense of cohesion across the album, aided by a pitch perfect production that skilfully walks a tightrope of maximising the velocity without in any way diluting the band’s intrinsic rawness.  This balance is embodied particularly vividly by the venomous Kill The Light and the slab-like ferocity of Deserted Centuries.

Lyrically, the coarsely rasping vocals evoke bleakly allusive, apocalyptic imagery to explore an increasingly dystopian future shaped by authoritarian oligarchs (Deserted Centuries), economic exploitation (Vanished Resilience), surveillance capitalism (False Control), political polarisation (Cycle Of Contention), and accelerating environmental catastrophe (The Great Reset).  So, choose your poison – banging head or pumping fist – and prepare to confront your darkest nightmares.

‘Different thoughts, different minds, And all you do is assume, You don’t want to think, Just be the loudest in the room’ (It’s On You)

Washington DC’s Grand Scheme return with their second 7-inch and follow-up to 2023’s excellent Numbers Game.  The band continue to hone a stripped back hardcore that deftly blends influences that span early 1980s’ US hardcore, the heavier end of 1990s’ youth crew, and 2000s’ melodic hardcore.

They prove consummately at ease with fusing these inspirations into fierce 90-second eruptions, frenzied blast beats and swinging two-step breakdowns proving instinctively natural bedfellows in their hands.  As a result, each of the seven tracks takes on its own distinctive character as the balance between these inspirations subtly shifts in emphasis, the furiously rhythmic punch of Click Buy Consume and Marketing Budget being personal stand outs.

The lyrical positivity of their debut though has taken on a notably darker hue.  The burly vocals drip with disdain for shallow gesture politics and bristle with contempt for our willingness to subjugate ourselves mindlessly to the relentless financialisation of culture and music.  A no nonsense EP certainly, but one brimming with ideas and passionate delivery.

‘They sneer with disgust, we hang in their nooses they lined with poisoned threads, trapped in their manmade hell so they can be gods’ (Manmade Hell)

Now this is an intense one.  From the absolutely blistering opener Starving Dogs, this debut four-track EP from Axon hits home with an almost overwhelming force.  Yet, as you immerse yourself in its seemingly remorseless ferocity, it also reveals a satisfyingly rich level of detailing.  Drawing on members of multiple East Coast bands – including Bato, Mutant Strain, Reckoning Force, and Thought Control – Axon take a Japanese hardcore base and force it through the viciously distorting lens of these more avowedly US influenced projects.

This spawns a brutal hybrid that refuses to settle into the archetypal Burning Spirits groove, preferring instead to propel the powerful riffage forward at a truly frenetic speed, the savagely intricate rhythms only relenting for the bulldozer breakdown of Industry and the scorching solos of Separate and Manmade Hell.  The fiendishly feral vocals, meanwhile, excoriate the ‘cult of capital’ that saturates every aspect of our lives, cultivating a delusional, all enveloping dogma that distorts and commoditises society to serve its insatiable demands.

‘No place is made without a struggle, No place can be our salvation, No place will be built from the rubble, Of the existing enclosures, Of the structures that confine our lives’ (Utopia)

Hailing from New York, Kaleidoscope were initially pretty prolific, firing off a fiercely inventive slew of EPs and the searing After The Futures… full-length between 2016 and 2020.  The band then went into hibernation as members focused on other projects, including Straw Man Army and Tower 7.  But the slumbering beast has been awoken, and its fury has only been peaked by the world’s subsequent trajectory.

Certain parallels can be drawn with Straw Man Army in terms of the sardonic, poetically rhythmic vocals and the fact that both bands are rooted in reimagining their respective 1980s’ anarcho-punk inspirations.  However, Kaleidoscope are, perhaps, best understood as that band’s burlier, angrier, more impulsive sibling.  Their sound has always been defined by an intuitive, organic quality, each member playing off the other in a way that instils a liberating sense of improvisation, yet one honed through the overarching disciplines of an explicitly hardcore punk lens.

Similarly, the band’s political convictions remain utterly undimmed. Lyrically, the album knits together a tightly drawn narrative of human exploitation (‘There’s an engine of greed to the squalor you see’), natural extraction (‘To save capital from its own crisis, to turn life into things’), and social segregation (‘Walled paradise mocks the slum, taking what it wants and leaving crumbs’) that is fashioned to feed the ravenous appetite of capital.  How this entrenched rationality works to breed complicity (‘Toiling in the fantasy’) and to suffocate resistance (‘Only seek the aesthetics of resistance’) is also deftly dissected.

The result is an album of visceral intensity that braids together both a muscular velocity and political vehemence with an intrinsic catchiness, from the bruising Blood Minerals to the darkly infectious White Idol, and from the swaggering stomp of Controlled Opposition to the cathartic escalation of the title track, before the fulminating fury of Utopia.  The album ends on the loosely swirling eddies of the instrumental Dirge For The Disappeared, a brief respite to catch your breath and contemplate the barbarity of the world we have built.

‘Your cross for me to bear, Your burden for me to wear, This violence has been ordained, I won’t be forced to live in shame’ (Sadistic)

Chicago’s Stress Positions are back, and their latest album is very much one of two sides, both vividly intense, yet very distinctly textured.  Side One is Stress Positions doing exactly what we expect Stress Positions to do and, if anything, their already unbridled intensity has been dialled up another vicious notch.  The band continue to unleash politically charged hardcore that revels in blistering speed and bruising stomp in equal measure.  They also continue to subtly integrate a more experimental edge, with flares of jazz-tinged psychedelia adroitly laced throughout their unforgiving fusillade.

From the harrowing roar that opens the album, the utterly rabid vocals unleash another level of sonic violence as they tackle themes of abortion rights (Sadistic), the systemic dehumanisation of migrants (Human Zoo), the violent horrors unfolding in Palestine (Nakba), and the poisoned fruits of militarised capitalism (Blood Money).  The searing title track and Blood Money perfectly embody the album’s uncompromising virtues.

Then things take a different turn on the flip side.  It opens with the instrumental track Kaddish, which braids together mournful chanting with reportage from Palestine.  The microphone is then passed to three remixes, two from Planet B (Justin Pearson’s and Luke Henshaw’s electronic project), and the other from Made By Human Hands.  Each brings intriguing new perspectives to bear, but Planet B’s reinterpretation of Human Zoo is the stand-out – the darkly ominous electronics and industrial beats add a ferocious new dynamic, and the moment when everything drops out bar the percussion as the words ‘Watch how they can read and write, Just like you and I’ is absolutely killer.

‘Sirenes, Blaves, Rodes, Punxades, Finestres, Trencades, La Caixa, Cremant’ (Ckaos Total) / ‘Sirens, Blue, Wheels, Punctures, Windows, Broken, The Box, Burning’ (Total Chaos)

Tàrrega is a small town in Catalonia that holds an annual theatre fair each September.  During the 1991 fair, skirmishes with the police escalated into a full scale pitched battle, which very nearly resulted in the burning down of the town hall.  The aftermath of the violence was defined by arbitrary arrests and the illegal detentions of 86 people.  The cases took over a decade to bring to court and resulted in nominal fines due to the lack of evidence.

As you will have gathered, Tàrrega 91 take their name from these events in their hometown and, as with their 2023 debut EP, Ckaos Total continues to mine the injustices that were inflicted by the authorities.  The crackling intensity of their onslaught transports you back to the unfolding night of violence, while their bristling anger compels you to confront the structural inequality that shapes our legal systems.

The emphasis is on stripped back, tightly honed, rampantly fast d-beat in the classic vein of the early 1980s’ originators.  The flaring dissonant melody of opener No Es Casa Teva (It’s Not Your House), the surging eruptions of Ossos Ets I Ossos Seras (You Are Bones And You will Be Bones), and the more expansive groove of I Ara Que Fars? (And Now What Will You Do?) compellingly capture the album’s anarchic spirit.

‘National illusion of equality work, Praise as heroes, with nothing in return, Just a polished blank surface for the elite, Mask it as inclusion in order to build the new underclass’ (Servants)

Stockholm’s Xiao, who feature former members of The Long Haul and No Omega, return with their debut full-length, Control, following up two previous EPs, 2021’s Pain and 2023’s Burn.  The band continue to stride the murky edgelands of where hardcore and powerviolence interwine and mutate.

The latter influence is delivered courtesy of the gratifyingly robust riffage, sludge-mired breakdowns, and fierce blast beat eruptions.  Meanwhile, the feral, rasping vocals and, when not embroiled in the blast beat mayhem, spryly bouncing rhythm section inject an undeniable hardcore urgency that is captured particularly vividly on the venomous Wrong and the seething Karoshi.  Guest vocalists, including Hanna Stjernlöf of Socialstyrelsen and Sara Gregory of Entry, add further fervour to the battery.

The barrelling, groove-laden barrage is fuelled by a coruscating analysis of a socio-economic system that relentlessly privileges financial objectives over social concerns and reshapes society to serve the rapacious needs of rentier capital – everything is for sale (Control), individual wealth is valorised over the common good (Who Pays The Real Price?), and work has become increasingly precarious and unfulfilling (Karoshi).  The resultant atomisation and exploitation (Servants) have then proven the ideal breeding ground for right wing extremism (End Of Times).  A spiral that enriches the few and degrades us all.