‘Welcome to the city nobody’s from, Lots of people have money and others have none, Don’t let the disparity get into your head’ (Land Of Opportunity)

Hailing from San Francisco, The Losers unleashed both their debut 7-inch and full-length, You Win, We Lose, in 2023 and are now back with a fresh 12-inch.  It combines two brand new five-track EPs, Land Of Opportunity and Storm The Beach, the latter of which was originally a cassette only release.  The band’s core sound reaches back to the West Coast hardcore punk of the early to mid-1980s (think, perhaps, early D.R.I’s rather louche, more atavistic sibling), before they inject it with their own snotty, contemporary vitality.

An organic looseness permeates the band’s rapid-fire barrage, melodic flourishes and reckless blues fuelled solos flaring through the languidly raw aesthetic.  As both EPs were recorded last year, there is satisfying coherency across the album with the bleakly discordant SF Decay, rabid California Dukha, and the two fiercely fluid title tracks hitting home with particular vigour.

The rhythmically sneering vocals drip with unrestrained disdain, occasionally taking a breath to fleetingly segue into semi-spoken word diatribes.  The greed, gentrification, and inequality that have come to define the band’s home city, and the exhausting battle to survive in the face of such a distorted environment, form the coruscating lyrical focus.