‘Impose blockades, Smirking at spillage and people’s plight, Food rotting, Spoiled and over ripe, Food, Water, Medicine…Essential aid denied’ (Essential Aid Denied)

A kinetic orbital strike apparently refers to a rather bleak military fantasy of an inert projectile that can be fired from space to wreak devastation through the kinetic energy it generates on impact.  As you conjure with that particular delight, imagine it in musical form.  Rarely has a band been so aptly named.

Kinetic Orbital Storm hail from Philadelphia and this, their debut full-length, builds on the uncompromising tenets that defined their two previous 7-inch EPs, both released in 2023 (K.O.S. and The True Disaster).  Savagely guttural vocals wrestle with apocalyptic futures and present-day horrors amid suffocating waves of distortion drenched riffage.  These strands are then bound tightly together by the relentlessly propulsive, d-beat fuelled rhythm section, one that is awash with crashing cymbals, manic fills, and delivered with a brutally uncompromising intensity.

Such is the band’s grip on these dynamics that the force of the individual riffs and the subtle shifts in pacing are never swamped within the onslaught. We’re taken from the bruising bass lines of Sadistic Torture to the bleakly choppy Crawling Fear, and then from the barbarous velocity of K.B.S. to the sledgehammer grooves of No Dream At All.  This is the sound of a band in total control of the chaos they are unleashing.