‘We never asked for anything, except that we may never go out of style, manufacturing safety, everything we touch is up for sale’.

Slow Ends, comprising former members of Archivist, have fused raging hardcore punk with melancholic shoegaze to brilliant effect.  Further underpinned by almost industrial expressions, Obsolete Bodies reveals a wonderful pop sensibility that manifests itself through soaring choruses and achingly beautiful melodic hooks.  Lyrically, the album explores the commodification and sanitisation of modern life in sardonically elegiac fashion.  This really is quite the treat.

A Culture of Killing return with their third album and what a rare gloom-drenched post-punk triumph it is.

The compositions themselves initially strike as sparse yet are, in fact, lush in detail (glockenspiel anyone?), lending the whole record a shimmering austerity. Blended with energised call-and-response vocals that are skilfully juxtaposed with the at times almost ethereal instrumentalisation, the Italians bring new perspectives to their anarcho-punk heritage. With nods to The Cure and even Billy Bragg, melodic discernment quietly underpins the band’s deathrock delivery without diluting its undeniable urgency.

Morrow return with their third LP, and this successor to the superb Covenant of the Teeth (2016) and Fallow (2018) is their most complete work yet.

Morrow’s template remains constant – a masterful fusion of thunderous d-beat with the soaring defiance of melodic crust.  This is overlaid by furious vocal interplay between Alex CF (previously Fall of Efrafa) and guest vocalists drawn from bands as diverse as Archivist, Autarch, Drei Affen, His Hero Is Gone and Socialstyrelsen, which work to truly monstrous effect.  The band’s instrumentalisation continues to refine, violin and cello mournfully weave their way through the wider crushing aural assault.  The result is an album that is in equal parts reflective and raucous.  It burns with anger, but above all with hopeful defiance.

Baltimore’s Neolithic have unleashed a pulverising debut full-length, a brutally well-executed reimagining of early 1990’s European death metal.

Roared vocals, down-tuned buzzsaw guitars, and a relentless rhythm section ensure that there is nowhere to hide as the band explore themes of political populist-authoritarianism and the sheer futility of our existence.  The band call upon a hardcore pedigree that manifests itself in the leanness of the song writing and the sheer ferocity of the delivery.  The impact is amplified by Neolithic’s keen awareness of melody and pacing dynamics – expertly marrying blistering pace with crushingly heavy mid-paced grooves.  A thoroughly modern exploration of the legacy of Bolt Thrower and Entombed.

Powerful, richly textured, gothic-leaning vocals form the centrepiece of Tulips’ sound.  They interplay with sparse, infectiously melodic guitar that writhes amidst pulsing, glacial synths and crisply fluid percussion.

On this follow up MLP to their excellent debut 2020 full-length Easy Games, Tulips’ potent base ingredients remain unchanged. Carefully crafted song writing conjures an atmosphere that is at once both plaintively haunting and mesmerisingly enthralling.  The beautifully elegiac air of self-reflection renders the sudden introspection-shattering eruptions of frustration all the more urgently cathartic.  And, also pressed on that most undervalued of formats the ten-inch record, what’s not to love?

‘It’s hard to care when you are tired, it’s hard to fathom the weight inside a mind that’s been worked to the bone, monolithic forces have soiled our hearts’.

Geld return with their third full-length LP and their visceral intent remains utterly intact.  The deranged psychedelic excursions of their earliest releases are now much more muted.  What remains is fiercely focused, inherently sinister hardcore punk.  Metallic-tinged guitars and blackened vocals set the tone, but the groove infused bass and brutally infectious drumming ensure that no matter how unhinged things threaten to get, you can’t help but want to move.

‘A worthless narrator, just keeps it contrived and if you can’t see through, I guess stay divided as one’.

Unrestrained, raw hardcore from New York’s Fairytale, which quite literally feels as if it is on the verge of careering totally out of control throughout its scorching duration.  Distorted, fuzz-drenched guitars lay down a blistering assault as the frantic d-beat orientated percussion tries desperately to keep pace, while never leaving a cymbal unhit.  And this is all brought together by a truly virtuoso vocal performance that veers from rasping rage to sardonic observation to the almost ethereal, without a breath ever being taken.  Chaos honed and given material form.

A blisteringly ferocious new six-song EP from Singapore’s Sial.

Sial’s brilliant last EP, Zaman Eden, found the band in a somewhat experimental mindset that allowed them to give free rein to their more progressive inclinations.  Here, they refashion those instincts within the strictures of contemporary hardcore to devastating effect.  Lyrics are in Bahasa Melayu (the language of Singapore’s indigenous minority) and the anger is palpable. Visceral, abrasive, uncompromising.

Powerfully growled vocals and satisfyingly down-tuned buzzsaw guitars combine with a decidedly fluent rhythm section to impressive effect, as Deathfiend unleash a brutally heavy death metal onslaught.

Deathfiend hail from Birmingham and are UK crust veterans, which is apt as both the city and that scene were integral to shaping English death metal in the late 1980s.  And it is a heritage that they have vividly reanimated on this their debut LP.  The emphasis is very much on the doom-laden, punk imbued groove of that era, rather than the more technical expressions of much contemporary death metal.  Karl Willetts (Bolt Thrower / Memoriam) aptly guest vocals on a track, and the black’n’roll phase of Entombed is another yardstick, as is Harmony Corruption-era Napalm Death through their shared love of a crushing mid-paced breakdown.

‘Looking back on your life, I just see the pain and strife, tied down to faith and family, between four walls of bigotry’.

An evocative exploration of memory and place, these five songs are a constant tug between the good times enjoyed and the mistakes made, things said and left unsaid.  Hazy guitars retain a striking melodic clarity as they shimmer above wonderfully fluid percussive rhythms, and interplay with passionate French / English vocals.  The effect is reverie inducing and will take each of us to quite different places, whether that be Litovsk’s Brest, the rain-swept beaches of childhood holidays in North Wales, or somewhere else entirely.  A thoroughly welcome return.