‘When it comes time to make stand, Will you theorise and obfuscate and say we don’t understand, When it comes time to make a stand, Do you think you can?’ (Affirmative Denial)

As your hips are insidiously lured into ill-advised gyrations, you find yourself wondering what element of JJ And The A’s fizzing armoury has provoked the manic grin spreading across your face.  Is it the cavorting anarchy of the organs? The contagiously whiplash rhythms? The energetically febrile vocals?  Of course, it’s all three as they were moulded into a rollicking carnivalesque fury.

JJ And The A’s have honed their craft across two cracking EPs, 2023’s self-titled debut and last year’s Eyeballer.  Both were defined by an unquenchable, irrepressible energy and I did wonder quite how this would translate to a full album.  I needn’t have worried as it has enabled the Copenhagen-based band to subtly expand their sound without in anyway diluting their velocity.  The closest proxy I can conjure is the darkly hedonistic spirit of The World/Inferno Friendship Society doused in SoCal punk vigour, with a healthy dash of extra hardcore stomp.

Each track delivers a slap to the face of a singular intensity, with the bristling In Vogue, the fabulously unhinged Needles, and the frenetically bouncing The Wraith, my personal highlights.  Amid these raucously uplifting eruptions, the ever-shapeshifting vocals cast a blackly wry eye over the state of the world from sweatshop exploitation and the inauthenticity of curated lives to the poisonous legacies of deindustrialisation and colonial oppression.