‘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.