‘Media surveillance corporations, feeding off our unique selves, commodify our interests and experiences, broken mirrors sell us back our dreams’ (Biometricks)

State Manufactured Terror’s debut EP instantly transports you back to the mid-to-late 1980s when crust punk and metal were first being brutally fused together.  The earliest iterations of Bolt Thrower and Napalm Death come most readily to mind, injected, perhaps, with a dash of Nausea’s hardcore swagger.

The New York band’s delivery is undeniably raw.  Individual instruments merge into a frenzied blur.  Bulldozer riffs and visceral solos occasionally flare, alongside the rasping anarcho-punk leaning vocals, amid the discordant chaos.  Yet there is an organic looseness that lends the onslaught an almost live dynamic that proves particularly vivid on Biometricks and Gentrification Displacement Machine.  The band’s politics are similarly uncompromising with surveillance capitalism, urban dispossession courtesy of real estate capital, and the recent horrors in the Middle East all firmly in focus.