‘Cameras in the living room, microphones listen to you sleep. Every home a cell, panopticon stalking us’ (Stalker)

My grindcore sweet spot is admittedly quite a tight one – I tend to like it to inform music rather than to represent its very essence.  I’m delighted though that I checked out Fake Dust.  They are a grindcore band down to their very boots, but they deploy those boots with an uncompromising intensity.  This is the Portland band’s debut release – following their 2022 demo – and it takes me back to the first time I was exposed to Napalm Death’s Scum and From Enslavement To Obliteration.  They share an energy of something that is utterly unhinged, wholly disinterested in compromise, and yet delivered with a brutal precision.

Spewed growls, banshee yowls, and guttural roars.  Drums that at times hit genuinely bewildering speeds and revel in fills aplenty but also know exactly when to ease off.  Bleakly filthy bass lines.  And riffs that when they assert themselves amid the carnage, do so with a brooding violence that would spark chaos in even the most restrained of pits.  As you might imagine, with twenty tracks being unleashed in under twenty minutes, the lyrics are straight to the point, conjuring the panopticon of technological enslavement and monetised surveillance that we are all now imprisoned within.

The album is, perhaps, best understood as a single sweeping, merciless onslaught.  And it is one that you will find yourself more than willing to submit to as they sweep from the rollicking breakdown that closes Implanted Imperative to the doom-laden heft of Lost Signal, and then from the jagged Starvation Field to the savagely crafted Little Bottle (Public Transportation Pt. 2).  The quality of the individual songwriting though is not to be underestimated.  Indeed, when the band become a touch more expansive on the closing tracks to both sides – Cooked At Conception and Paranoid Epiphany – none of their merciless intent is diluted.  This is grindcore executed with a rare flair.