Remember bands like Nails, All Pigs Must Die, Trap Them and other Southern Lord bands of the mid 00s? That grimy, downturned, feedback laced Swedish death metal-meets hardcore and grind/d-beat sound that Gatecreeper , Fuming Mouth and such expanded on more recently? Well, the UKS Mastiff is here to take you back to that with […]

So like, as a dude inching closer and closer to 40, I’ve been finding myself doing a fair amount of self-reflecting and fighting through existential crises and all that fun shit. I often end up wondering what the hell is wrong with me because I remember being in my teens and 20s and having a […]

France’s Embrace Your Punishment started as a pretty standard hardcore Hatebreed-ish band with some death metal hues back in 2014s Honor Before Glory, but has got progressively heavier with 2019s Nameless King, especially vocally. And now with album number 3, Made of Stone, are an absolute beast of a band that blends hardcore, brutal death […]

Have you ever come upon a band that sounded so hateful and intense that you began asking yourself why has this band slipped past your radar?  Several years ago my good friend Graham sent me a Bandcamp link to End’s Splinters From An Ever​-​Changing Face album.  Honestly, I cannot remember for the life of me […]

Everything about the UK’s Svalbard can be characterized, in one way or another, as high-freaking-impact. Even when the band is taking a brief respite from their usual full-speed-ahead musical approach – a high-octane mix of Post-Hardcore, Metalcore, Black Metal and D-Beat that rarely (if ever) pulls any punches – they’re still likely coming at you face-first […]

I have quite a great deal of respect for Danny Schuler, drummer for Biohazard.  When Bill Tolley passed away, in the line of duty for FDNY, in 2017 Danny posted on the Internal Bleeding Facebook wall his support and leaving us his number.  This warmed my dark heart.  When I joined IB back in 1994, […]

God damn it feels like I’ve been waiting on this one forever – and for all intents and purposes, it has been a long time coming. After dropping the unrelenting (and criminally underrated) Firsthand Accounts in 2019, Long Island’s Johnny Booth released their first new single all the way back in March of 2021 (The very good, […]

Throw in former members of NYDM bands like Pyrexia (Danny Trapani-guitar) and Internal Bleeding (Jerry Lowe), throw in some pizza, mobster shit, the Statue of Liberty, street corner hotdogs and pretzels and throw in a blender with NYHC up your ass and Punchyourface gets plopped out.  Street Terrorists is their second full-length and Jerry and […]

So, a little personal life update that no one asked for – I’ve been in the process of trying to cut coffee out of my daily routine. Let me be clear, this isn’t a battle against caffeine addiction or anything like that – when I was drinking coffee it was usually one cup every morning, […]

Given recent efforts I’ve reviewed from the likes of In Flames and Hellripper, the topic of bands evolving and following their own artistic journeys has certainly been at the forefront of my mind – and I will gladly defend, ’til the day I die, any band’s right to continue pushing forward and exploring new avenues […]

I’m gonna be honest – there’s a lot about Sweden’s Knogjärn that, at first glance, I really wasn’t sure about. I’m the first to admit, I can sometimes be a judgemental shit. I’m working on it. But as I looked at the band, their heavy usage of brass knuckle images led to the sneaking suspicion […]

Over the last few years, metalhead jack-of-all-trades Ben Murray (Light This City, Heartsounds, Darkness Everywhere, No Chemistry) has built Creator-Destructor Records into quite the diverse little powerhouse of a label. Representing everyone from legendary punk rockers A Wilhelm Scream, to Beatdown bruisers like Sunami and Kruelty, to filthy Death Metal acts like Dismemberment and Spinebreaker. […]

One of my favorite albums of 2021 was the fantastic Decadence and Decay from Oregon’s Silver Talon, an album and a band that certainly have plenty going for themselves on their own merit, but the album was an immediate hit for me not because it was something I’d never heard before – but instead it […]

This is, apparently, album number 3 for these dudes – but it’s my first ride at the Mentor rodeo. I will say this: when I saw the excellent album cover of Wolves, Wraiths and Witches, I had a few preconceptions about what I’d find inside – that being some heavy, stonery-y doom metal project dripping […]

GOD DAMN. So, four albums in, most people familiar with the modern Metallic Hardcore scene probably need no introduction to the UK’s Employed to Serve. The explosive voice of Justine Jones along with her compatriot bruisers have made quite an impact in a world of heavy hitters the likes of Knocked Loose, Code Orange and […]

Expectations can be such a damn bummer sometimes. You go ahead and put your full effort into something because of trivial things like “passion” and “integrity” or whatever, and next thing you know you’ve got people like your boss, your spouse, your kids coming at you like “hey that last thing was great, you should […]

“Come up front! You’re going to do it later anyway! Just do it now!” This was the beckon of Wolf King’s frontman Tim Wilson when I saw his band open for Conjurer, Entheos, and Rivers of Nihil. I did not answer this call. Well, at least not favorably. See, I’m about 5’6”, was sitting at […]

I am relatively new to the Gatecreeper fan bandwagon – I would say about 2 years now and their brand of buzzsaw Swedish inspired death metal, mixed with hardcore grooves and stomps is brutal, punishing, catchy and what drew me into them in the first place.  Being on lockdown during this Pandemic has been brutal […]

Listen, I fully understand the hate for Hatebreed. Past their influential debut, they have been responsible for popularizing ‘hardcore’ and making it more commercial, and putting it in malls and on MTV. But there is no denying their chest-beating anthemic take on ‘bro-core’ has been the rallying cry for a generation and more than likely […]

I was first exposed to Harm’s Way many years ago when I saw them open for Hate Eternal (if I recall right).  I remember being blown away by their energy and their killer beatdown hardcore style, and the nasty vocal style of their oft-shirtless lead man (who looks like he could be a professional powerlifter).  […]

If crossover was the result of punk and metal’s liquor fueled party hook-up, surely sludge was the junk addicted offspring born during the dark times they spent shooting tar with rusty works in an abandoned building. Sludge’s early years were spent as the musical gutter child of the vitriol and speed of punk and the […]

Pardon me while I pick my face off of the floor, Cop Problem just sheared my grill off with this rager of an EP. Intense d-beat and crust influenced hardcore that slays and slays for every second of its nine minutes. This is an urgent, ripping blast of catharsis straight from the streets of Killadelphia […]

Well thank the goat and Odin that I wasn’t asked to review the 80’s TV soap of the same name. Dynasty are a West Coast outfit playing the musical style often referred to as ‘hardcore’. Admittedly, I’m about as familiar with metal-infused hardcore as I am with 80’s TV soaps, although I know enough about […]

Brevity in musical descriptions goes a long ways in my book. Less IS more. Much like Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory”, it gives credit to the beholder’s imagination to not just fill in the blanks, but to also not have their interpretation of the art limited to someone else’s view. It gives more freedom to the appreciator. […]

France’s Comity constructs lengthy songs from short, violent outbursts of tightly wound riffs. It’s spastic, ragingly violent hardcore with a heavy dose of noise rock and a touch of post rock shimmer. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done many times before, but the restraint they show in the second half of The Journey is Now […]