‘They want to be god, To let them is our sin, Our freedom is theirs, We’re strung up like a puppet, Hanging by a thread’ (Abattoir)

Subdued made quite the bang when they first arrived with a fine EP and 2020’s cracking Over The Hills And Far Away full-length.  Yet, four years is a long time in our contemporary era of shortened attention spans and fickle fashions.  However, as anyone who has had the good fortune of catching Subdued over the past year knows, this time has been put to very good use indeed. An even darker, leaner, angrier band has emerged from the shadows.

And the high expectations primed by these live performances are fully justified on this, their second album, Abbatoir.  The band’s sound remains rooted in the traditions of anarcho-punk, but vividly reimagined, indeed remorselessly hardened, and imbued with a menacing intensity to reflect our times.  Rasping, sneering, semi-shouted vocals carry a distinctly London cadence as they are intertwined in lockstep with powerfully fluid, almost tribal, rhythm section.

This creates the perfect complement for an utterly inspired guitar attack as it seamlessly segues from the muscular and metallic to the densely complex and breathlessly fast.  Seething, discordant melodies shroud and envelop each tightly crafted track and ensure that the bleakly ominous atmosphere never relents even for a moment.  Each listen reveals new layers, new flourishes of intrigue – whether the infectious dissonance of Vulturemen, the writhingly serpentine Children Of God, or the venomous Abattoir itself.

The imagery of the abattoir provides a consistent motif throughout the album – quite literally on the bruising opener, Machine Hell, as it tackles the horrors of the meat industry (‘They are cold and alone, waiting for the killing blow’), and then more allusively as tracks such as Vulturemen (‘They strip the world and sell its skin’), Finish (Where’s true peace? Where’s true worth? Poisoned everything’), and the title track explore our exploitative economic system.

Meanwhile, Who Dies If England Lives? grapples with the legacies of empire (‘Justice died a million times’) and Children Of God the violence fuelled in the name of religion (‘Is it worth making hell for an unknown heaven?’).  The album climaxes on the raw cry ‘We deserve anarchy now’, when instead all we are promised is the protection of the very status quo that got us into this mess in the first place.