‘You’re kidding me, you think we’re free? I hope you miss that raised up fist, from someone you so sweetly kissed’ (Complicit)

Tethered’s debut LP is in many ways a love letter to another time, although not necessarily entirely in the way you might think.  Yes, musically it draws on a very specific musical tradition, namely that captured by the likes of Ebullition and Gravity Records in the mid-to-late 1990s.  Tautly serpentine riffage, and tension ratcheting builds, blended with a healthy metallic heft and jazz inflected rhythms.  Think, perhaps, Bread And Circuits entwined with You And I, with just a frisson of Swing Kids, and you’ll be heading in the right direction.

This, the London band do with a searing passion and sheer verve that ensures that what unfolds burns with its own very distinctive identity.  However, you sense that, perhaps, the more defining connection goes rather deeper than this, to the very values that fuelled that musical moment.  Throughout hardcore’s history there are phases when its horizons seem to narrow through attempts at commercial or political appropriation.  And that era, along with the earlier DC Revolution Summer, spoke directly to rejecting those bids for control– restating the value of DIY, reanimating the political, and reintroducing an emotional vulnerability.

The harshly invigorating vocals prove an irresistible binding force, rooted more in a traditional hardcore, rather than screamo, delivery.  Their poetically framed lyrics explore themes of isolation and disconnection, interwoven with a recurring recognition of our own complicity in this atomisation of our lives.  The intensity is as unrelenting as it is tightly crafted.  The savage escalations of Consume.  The lacerating desperation of Time Travel.  The seething agitation of Complicit.  The dissonant melancholy of Home.  Prepare for some sweet convulsions.