‘What does it feel like, to look into your soul, so curdled you’ve forgotten, anything other than the bottom line, that you’ve gotta be out for yourself, a better world is possible’ (Grievance Process)

The opening track, Glamour Shocks, erupts with a riff of unbridled, neanderthal velocity.  As it venomously slams your body side to side, the utterly bludgeoning drums lay into you with a similarly uncompromising intensity.  Before, the lead guitar sparks into life with a serpentine tautness that seems designed solely to taunt and tease its burlier counterparts.

Chicago’s Daddy’s Boy had gone a little quiet since their 2022 debut, Great News!  However, they now return in utterly rampant fashion.  The key lies in the searing tension they conjure between the deft and the destructive.  The muscular heft of the rhythm guitar jousts with melodic leads of savagely angular dexterity.  At times, the rhythm section seems interested in delivering nothing but a battering of sledgehammer brutality, yet then intertwines just shy of blast beat volleys with deliciously fluid, jazz-tinged excursions.

The semi-spoken, semi-shouted vocals are riven with a fierce tension all of their own.  They balance a desperate urgency with a sardonic detachment, a bleak despair with an innate sense of optimism that all hope is not yet lost as they confront a society being suffocated by the totalising logic of the market that feeds on relentlessly turning us against one another.

The helter-skelter intensity is remorseless.  Divorce is bruising and skittering in equal measure.  The darkly sombre tirade of Free Speech Zone.  The contorting twists and blistering turns of Someone Else’s Home.  Meanwhile, the combative exhortations of the violently juddering Polite tell us in no uncertain terms that our silence will not save us.  But Daddy’s Boy just might.