‘Cultural destruction, Forced displacement, And Trauma, The fabric of our agony, Slowly becomes threads’ (Cultural Destruction)

Ahead of Lágrimas’ European tour this autumn, Ruido Y Pasión Records have been busy giving the vinyl treatment to the band’s discography.  Earlier this year, they released a compilation 12-inch featuring the band’s latest EP, I’m Not Strong Enough For This, and their 2019 debut EP, Like When I Was A Kid.  Now it is the turn of their debut album, 2024’s A Life Of Destruction, which was the immediate follow-up to their searing 2023 split album with Habak (indeed, members of Habak contribute to two of the album’s tracks, Justified Violence and Resistance).

The band’s earliest material was rooted in the writhing dynamics of 1990s’ screamo, but the split with Habak saw the band give increasing prominence to their melodic crust influences, and this is a pattern further reinforced on A Life Of Destruction.  The bleakly raw vocals draw on an anarchist framing to explore the connections between the slow violence inflicted by gentrification, cultural dispossession, and entrenched poverty, with the militarised violence used to protect those same privileged interests both at home and overseas.

As they sweep from the mournful chime that defines the smouldering title track to the venomous oscillations of Non-Inclusive, and the soaring anguish of Last, it proves a thoroughly impassioned journey.  Swells of haunting neo-crust are fused with savagely cathartic hardcore eruptions and studded with flares of blackened melodicism, a melancholic introspection deeply infused with a fiercely seething, unquenchable defiance.