‘Your life: traded like currency, Your love: burned up like gasoline, Manufacture need, Expedite receipt, Few can take part in the dream, built with stolen blood’ (Futurerock)

As hardcore punk continues to morph and reformulate itself into new shapes, it can sometimes be easy to forget the importance of base principals.  This is an accusation that could never be levelled at San Diego’s Negative Blast.  Theirs is a sound that positively revels in these essentials – the spit, the snap, the sheer velocity are all apparent in gratifying abundance.

Destroy Myself For Fun! is the band’s second album, following on from their 2023 debut, Echo Planet, and their split EP with Sweat from the same year.  Each of the eight tracks is a tensely coiled eruption.  Full, muscular guitars are underpinned by a propulsively limber rhythm section that imbues proceedings with an unashamed rock’n’roll swagger.  Their grip on the anchoring tenets is formidable and this, in turn, affords them the scope to assuredly flex their more inventive instincts.  From the woozy, sludge fuelled breakdown that defines the bruising Nuwage to the staccato stomp of Denial, by way of the darkly melancholic melody woven through Futurerock, the energy is never less than invigorating.

Meanwhile, the snarled vocals animate the lived experience of immigrant communities, both new and established, in the US in the context of the hostile domestic environment and the volatile cocktail of complicity and adventurism currently shaping the country’s position in the world.  This also inspires a parallel theme of working to maintain personal authenticity, both as an American from the emigrant diaspora, and simply as an individual, in the face of the polarising excesses and ceaseless distractions of surveillance capitalism.