‘Another lesson in impermanence, In the lattice of coincidence, The same actions are repeated, Like we haven’t learned anything’ (Secondhand Future)

We live in a world that seeks to desensitise us to the horrors committed in our name, or at least to the complicity of our governments.  That seeks to ensure that we are so focused on insulating ourselves from the insecurities that permeate our lives that we dehumanise those trapped at the margins.  And all so wealth can be disproportionately accumulated at the expense of the common good. Industry’s self-titled second album confronts this cycle of self-harm and exploitation with a fierce clarity.

Last year’s debut full-length was a stirring invocation of the classic elements of anarcho-punk, that this follow-up ramps up to the next level.  The metallic-tinged guitars unfurl with a darkly brooding menace.  The flaring melodies are saturated in elegiac fury.  The martial rhythms snap with a renewed spite.  The impassioned vocals morph from raw semi-shouts to venomous rat-a-tat denunciations as they explore, through an anarchist framing, a world shape by militarised violence overseas and the slow violence of austerity economics and mass incarceration at home.

The resultant onslaught is pared down to its essentials, the tightly disciplined palette ensuring that the Berlin band’s delivery is resolutely uncompromising in its intensity.  Disconsolate desolation and a bristling, combative hope for a better future intertwine throughout as Industry sweep from the sombre melodic flourishes of Manipulated Reality to the visceral agitations of War On The Poor, and the furiously insistent climax of Western Dystopia.