‘Artificial freedom, Numb like never before, Got your programmed mindset, No free will anymore’ (Deserted Centuries)

During the course of 2022, 偏執症者 Paranoid released a series of four two-track 7-inch EPs, to celebrate the band’s 10^th anniversary and to reflect the Swedish trio’s desire at the time to release their music more spontaneously, without the more rigorous demands of entering the studio to record a full-length album.  Beach Impediment have now done everyone the tremendous service of collating these EPs into a single full-length album.

Paranoid have always been a band to draw on influences from across the hardcore punk spectrum, before sculpting them into their own abrasively distinctive sound.  The constant threads are the thrash fuelled guitars, pounding d-beat rhythms, and galloping crust propulsion that are then imbued in equal measure, with a fiercely combative punk attitude and a notable NWOBHM sense of melodic drama.

The fact that the original EPs were each recorded in close proximity to one another ensures a real sense of cohesion across the album, aided by a pitch perfect production that skilfully walks a tightrope of maximising the velocity without in any way diluting the band’s intrinsic rawness.  This balance is embodied particularly vividly by the venomous Kill The Light and the slab-like ferocity of Deserted Centuries.

Lyrically, the coarsely rasping vocals evoke bleakly allusive, apocalyptic imagery to explore an increasingly dystopian future shaped by authoritarian oligarchs (Deserted Centuries), economic exploitation (Vanished Resilience), surveillance capitalism (False Control), political polarisation (Cycle Of Contention), and accelerating environmental catastrophe (The Great Reset).  So, choose your poison – banging head or pumping fist – and prepare to confront your darkest nightmares.