‘My kids have lived before a hundred thousand times, My kids have walked the earth on paganistic roads…Their faces are young and kind, Their brains are wild and ancient’ (My Kids)

Cleveland’s Cruelster make a welcome return some seven years after their debut album, Riot Boys.  In the intervening period, members have been involved in a range of other projects, most pertinently perhaps, Knowso.  Both bands share a penchant for taut guitars and agitated rhythms, but whereas Knowso lean into a certain discipline through restraint, Cruelster’s approach is an altogether more hyperactive one.

Samples galore, jagged riffs, catchy hooks, duelling vocals, Irish pipes, and surprisingly melodic choruses are thrown into the melting pot with an atavistic relish.  That wholly formed songs emerge could provoke surprise where the level of focus and detailing that the band invest not so abundantly clear.  The energy that permeates the whiplash twenty-one tracks is utterly manic, yet shards of lucidity suddenly, fleetingly, emerge through the chaos.  The raucously layered Nuclear Word, the fiercely gyrating Now I’m Terrestrial, and the contagiously surging Mayor For A Day each land with a satisfying clarity.

As you would probably anticipate, this raw verve is matched by the lyrical themes as they plunge into a crazed labyrinth that takes in its stride, Julian Assange being in possession of nuclear launch codes, emigrating to Belarus to have a baby, and being under the control of a telekinetic mayor.  What exactly this all means is arguably open to conjecture, but my guess is that it may well be suggesting that we are all absolutely screwed.