‘Now just a mark on cold, porcelain. Seeping through the grout, underneath the tile, the history of suffering won’t come out. Come closer. Come and see death’ (Hospital Tile)

When I caught Iron Lung live back in June, they were in utterly uncompromising form.  Power violence can appear a misleadingly straightforward business at times – sludge mired riffage here, blast beat eruption there.  But when you see it in the hands of such accomplished performers, this misconception is swiftly shed as they ruthlessly render it down to its very essence.

The duo, who have been honing this sonic brutality for over twenty years, are now back with their fourth full-length, and first since 2013’s White Glove Test.  And Adapting // Crawling delivers everything you could hope for from an Iron Lung release.  The lurking danger with any power violence album, no matter how well realised, is that it can unwittingly merge in on itself.  However, Iron Lung again prove supremely adept at investing each track with its own clear identity and injecting their onslaught with a sense of space that amplifies the wider stop-start ferocity.

Conceptually, the poetically roared vocals grapple with both notions of mortality and more directly experiences of the US healthcare system, which is one seemingly shaped rather more by motives of profit than of clinical care, or even basic humanity.  Personal stand outs are the bleakly savage A Veiled Eye, the industrial fury of Virus, and the desperation drenched Hospital Tile.