‘We are your poor and huddled masses, Forgotten servants, The streets we built have become our homes, Why, why do we give up our lives?’ (Birds Of Passage)

Groundwork were a hardcore band from Tucson, who were active between 1991 and 1994.  Following four EPs, the band released their only full-length and final release, Today We Will Not Be Invisible Nor Silent.  It proved to be one of the defining releases of 1990s’ hardcore and has now been reissued on its 30th anniversary.

That the band’s touring counterparts included Chokehold, Struggle, and Unbroken, provides an accurate handle on the band’s pedigree.  They emerged at the very nexus of where hardcore’s fast emerging metallic evolution was consciously reconnected and invested with the politics and ethics of DIY hardcore punk.  From the moment the darkly ominous opening riff to A Prayer For The Dead unfurls, the influence that Groundwork were to have on many bands that followed is immediately evident.  But this should not distract from just how powerful a work it is in its own right.

Leanly discordant guitars are marbled with dissonant melody and underpinned by a sparingly limber rhythm section.  Chaos-tinged eruptions serve to highlight the disciplined velocity of the wider battery.  Indeed, the band’s willingness to let their songs breathe, to build momentum is, undoubtedly, one of the album’s defining features.  There is a sparseness to their sound, one that sees a constant push-pull between unfiltered aggression and controlled ferocity.  It is arguably best captured by Question Me and Birds Of Passage.

This is matched by the vocals as they braid the viscerally raw with passages of solemn spoken word and flourishes of more melodic reflection.  The bleakly poetical lyrics have lost none of their potency as they explore colonial legacies (A Payer For The Dead), the cultural violence of misogyny (Question Me, Hungry), American exceptionalism (Daily Bread), economic exploitation (Birds Of Passage), and our wider consumerist complicity (Willing Victim, Channel One).

Unfortunately, the band dissolved shortly after the album’s release in 1994, and members went on to play in Absinthe, Bury Me Standing, and Four Hundred Years.  As legacies go mind, Today We Will Not Be Invisible Nor Silent is none too shabby.