Grab your air guitar and rev your imaginary motorbike.  Next, fill a bucket with spit, sweat, and lager (blend to taste) and pour it over your head.  Right, you’re ready for Hot Load.

The band name. The song titles. The aesthetic.  They all point in one direction and one direction only.  And when you wear your heart on your sleeves so brazenly, there really is a pressure to live up to the billing.  And that Hot Load do in spades.  This is hardcore that wants to rock.  And to do so in the sleaziest, sweatiest, most beer soaked way imaginable.

As with their 2025 debut, 2025’s Fate Unknown, their second full-length draws on punk and metal influences with an equal relish and then fashions them into something even more decidedly unwholesome.  The riffs are muscular, the blues-tinged solos extravagant, the bass lines filthy, and the rhythms swaggering, while the growled vocals rabidly indulge their love of life’s baser pleasures.

Personal highlights are the feral Exotic Weapon – where the band really lean into their thrashier instincts – as well as the sheer unbridled rock’n’roll gusto of Widowmaker and the unhinged d-beat of Salvo.   As you will have gathered, the Los Angeles band, who share members with Cemento and Death Rites, don’t really deal in subtlety.  But you know what?  That can feel a rather overrated virtue when an album hits home with the unabashed, instinctual velocity of Realized.