Featured Releases

Paranoiac: Morbid Psycho / Mental Laceration 12" (Toxic State Records) Toxic State Records brings us the debut vinyl from this Los Angeles metal band featuring familiar faces from hardcore and punk bands like Condition, Blazing Eye, Hoax, and many other. Paranoiac breaks the Toxic State mold (insofar as there is one) in several respects: the band is from L.A. rather than New York, they’re the most purely metal band Toxic State has ever put out, and there isn’t even a screen printed jacket on this one (though the art looks killer regardless of printing method). While the presentation is punk, the music sounds like it reaches almost exclusively back to Slayer’s Metal Blade era for inspiration, with an evil, blackened thrash vibe that sounds so classic it could have been recorded at any point in the past 40 years. Despite this being on a small independent punk label, the band is so tight and accomplished they can occasionally sound as precise as Slayer did in their Def American era, particularly on “Mental Laceration,” whose mid-paced groove sounds ripped straight from Seasons in the Abyss. I don’t want to paint Paranoiac as Slayer copycats, though. The drumming is very different (no double kick!), as are the vocals, which have something of Tom Araya’s sneer but a much raspier, almost crusty grit to them. While there’s a lot of “punks playing metal” about lately, Paranoiac separates themselves from the pack with truly noteworthy, high-level musicianship and a sound that’s just different enough from the typical Bolt Thrower and Amebix influences that typically come from this world. Morbid Psycho / Mental Laceration is one of those records you can throw on at a party full of punks and metalheads and both crowds will pound their fists in the air in approval.

Consensus Madness: Endeavors 12" (Iron Lung Records) Chicago’s Consensus Madness brings us the long-awaited follow-up to their 2023 EP, once again via the mighty Iron Lung Records. I was in the tank for Consensus Madness before I heard a note, since I’ve been following all four of the group’s musicians since long before Consensus Madness started. I’m sure Endeavorswould have caught my ear regardless, though, as it’s exactly the kind of blazing, hook-filled punk record I love. Despite being composed almost entirely of sub-two-minute songs that rip at hardcore tempos, Endeavors sidesteps hardcore’s penchant for messiness and chaos; it’s all clean lines, driving rhythms, and simple and sturdy chord progressions pounded out as root notes and bar chords with minimal embellishment. This approach does a couple of things. First, it places the focus squarely on the vocals, which are excellent, delivered with a charismatic speak/shout and lyrics that examine the moral and existential conundrums of middle age with thoughtfulness that resists rumination or passivity. Second, the “clean lines” approach means that when Consensus Madness departs from that relentless forward push with a bass line that pulls against the song’s main rhythm or a guitar chord with a touch of dissonance, you really notice, and these subtle moves give Endeavors personality more effectively than a less considered, throw-everything-against-the-wall approach. Long story short, if you love the fast-n-hooky sound of Dangerhouse bands like the Eyes, the Bags, and Rhino 39, this is going to be right up your alley.

Zipper: Muoio Quando Voglio Io cassette (Autsajder Produkcija) Croatia’s Autsajder Produkcija, the label run by Karlo from Indikator B, brings us another hit of raw and passionate international punk with this debut cassette from Milan, Italy’s Zipper. While Milano is the city that gave us Wretched, Negazione, and Rappresaglia, Zipper doesn’t sound like they’re trying to copy the 80s Italian bands. To my ears, Zipper fits better in the aesthetic lane Autsajder Produkcija has carved out for themselves with their first couple years’ of releases from bands like Indikator B, Poguba, Alambrada, and Muro. The words I used above—raw and passionate—kind of say it all, but there’s something about the way these bands—Zipper included—combine fast, raw punk that’s inspired by (but not overly indebted to) the 80s with just a hint of melody really stands out in the current international punk scene, which tends to be dominated by bands that stick to a very narrow set of aesthetic parameters. On Muoio Quando Voglio Io, Zipper sounds more organic and less considered, their blocky power chords and straightforward rhythms coming off as straightforward rather than simple or dumbed-down, and the vocalist sounding like they’re yelling from their gut about things they’re passionate about rather than trying to put on a certain kind of voice. I wish I could understand the lyrics, but I feel like Zipper taps into the universal language here, making me believe what they’re saying even if I don’t actually understand the words. For those of us obsessed with international hardcore punk, that’s the feeling we’re all after, right?

Mirage: S/T 12” (Roachleg Records) After a couple of noteworthy EPs, New York’s Mirage deliver their first proper LP for Roachleg Records. Like Sorry State’s Psico Galera, on this album Mirage seems to take a lot of influence from the later work by pioneers of the “furious years” of Italian hardcore. While bands like Wretched, Indigesti, and Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers started out creating some of the wildest, most primitive-sounding music I’ve ever heard, all three bands gradually moved toward sounds that were far more musically accomplished and characterized by a uniquely unsettling atmosphere. Mirage seems to be in the same boat as those bands as they matured, committed to punk’s fundamental intensity and heaviness, but augmented with an ambition to spread their wings and make sounds that are more creative, intricate, and varied. And Mirage shows a huge amount of range here. While most songs feature fast, knotty rhythms you’ll love if you dug the latest Psico Galera record, a track like “Morso Infettivo” proves they can still put the pedal to the metal and summon that sense of wildness that made so many of us fall in love with 80s Italian hardcore. And there are a few moments that are downright surprising, like the instrumental interlude “Mirage I.” “Mirage I” is the first song on the b-side, and when I drop the needle on that side, my head always snaps back for a second as I wonder to myself, “did someone press an Eddy Current Suppression Ring record on the b-side of this by mistake?” But nope, that’s just Mirage leaning into a heavy, almost krautrock-y rhythm and letting a refreshing draft of melody into their world. It’s all wrapped in a recording that’s heavy, bright, and textured in all the right ways and a beautiful, insert-heavy package featuring a ton artwork from guitarist Matt Morgantini. A must-listen for anyone who values both originality and intensity their hardcore punk.

Stingray: Enemy 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus) La Vida Es Un Mus brings us the third record from this London band. I had only listened to the previous two Stingray records in passing, but that sick-looking Blasphemy-inspired sleeve made me curious about what was going on with Enemy. What I found was a thirteen-minute rampage that’s like a potpourri of metal/punk sub-styles. There are moments that remind me of the Cro-Mags’ Best Wishes, the fist-pumping d-beat of Sacrilege’s demos, bouncy pogo parts that wouldn’t be out of place in the early Toxic State Records catalog, a lot of old school death metal, burly vocals from the Doom / Extreme Noise Terror school, and the occasional sprinkle of unhinged, whammy bar-heavy guitar soloing. LVEUM’s description of Enemy calls it “London on a plate,” and I hear that, both in the record’s dank, cavernous sound and in the way it touches so many corners of the underground. That’s something I associate with UK hardcore; while I think of bands from Italy, Sweden, or Japan as honing a specific, distinctive style, UK bands like Napalm Death, Heresy, E.N.T., and plenty of others seemed to throw all kinds of things into their pot of influences. While that’s certainly true of Enemy, Stingray boils that pot down pretty thoroughly, its concise 13-minute runtime leaving zero room for bloat or unwelcome eclecticism. I’d argue that Enemy delivers on that eye-catching sleeve design… it’s burly, desperate, beautifully ugly-sounding, and bursting with riffs.

Grotto: Targeted Solution 12” (Neon Taste Records) Targeted Solution is the debut record by this supremely pissed-off hardcore band from Calgary, Canada. Some time ago, I remember a band (I’ve sadly forgotten who) describing themselves as “regular hardcore,” as in not d-beat or beatdown or crust or fastcore or youth crew or whatever microgenre people are referencing these days. While “regular hardcore” is obviously self-effacing, I hear a critique implicit in the term, calling out bands for losing the forest for the trees, focusing too much on manipulating the minor signifiers of subgenre like a genetic engineer toying with strands of DNA. The alternative is throwing all that out the window, letting rip, and trying to tap into the universal well of anger and intensity that drew us to hardcore punk in the first place. By that definition, Grotto sounds like “regular hardcore” to me. Like a lot of bands these days, they’re musically accomplished, playing tight and fast and generating a big, burly sound, but they aren’t afraid to reach across those subgenre lines to use everything available in hardcore’s toolbox. There are fast d-beat parts, chunky mid-paced parts, super catchy riffs, some scissor beat parts that sound like a musical seizure, brief heavier and more atmospheric bits… there’s all kinds of stuff going on, but none of it, for a second, sounds like anything but hardcore. While I hesitate to compare Grotto to any particular band because their sound is so not on-the-nose, but something about them reminds me of Cold Sweat. There are lots of things Cold Sweat did that Grotto doesn’t (blasting parts, Black Flag-y lunging rhythms), but there’s a desperate tenor to the music the two bands undoubtedly share. Viva regular hardcore!

Barrows: Tomorrow’s Fear 12” (self-released) Tomorrow’s Fear is the self-released debut album from Barrows, from Japan’s Tajima province. Mike from Analog Attack was talking about Tomorrow’s Fear in one of his recent videos, and he spoke about how Tajima is a provincial part of Japan without the important punk infrastructure of venues, practice spaces, and record stores you find in larger cities/scenes like Tokyo and Osaka. Barrows’ home base seems significant to me because, despite the heavy nods to Disaster and Disclose in so many aspects of this album, Tomorrow’s Fear nevertheless avoids the feeling that it came off the raw punk assembly line. Yes, it’s bathed in the fried tones of Disclose’s Tragedy, but unlike, say, the new Meanwhile EP we were talking about a few weeks ago (which, by the way I love), Tomorrow’s Fear doesn’t feel like a studious deconstruction and reconstruction of Discharge’s songs (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Because the riffs and songs don’t feel overly familiar, they hit in a way that feels more visceral and direct; I’m never pulled out of the moment by an impulse to figure out exactly what Barrows is appropriating. That being said, Tomorrow’s Fear is pitched-down-the-middle, no-surprises d-beat raw punk, so if that’s your thing (read: you’re still regularly spinning that killer Ultimate Disaster record from last year), I don’t see any reason you wouldn’t love this.

Cold Phoenix: Your Eyes Are My Eyes 12” (General Population) Fan club reissue of this obscure Italian post-punk / darkwave 12” EP, originally released (in a presumably very small edition) in 1985. Maybe the European darkwave heads knew about Cold Phoenix already (someone out there is driving the original pressing’s price into the several-hundred-dollars range), but this was new to me when this version arrived on Sorry State’s doorstep. While this originally came out in 1985, it reminds me of the UK bands releasing records a few years earlier, in that period when the post-punk pendulum was swinging away from the avant-garde and toward the more commercial. Your Eyes Are My Eyes has similar vibe to records like Sad Lovers and Giants’ Epic Garden Music, the Chameleons’ Script of the Bridge, Modern English’s Mesh & Lace, and the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds and Faith, with a balance of dour atmosphere, post-punk propulsion, and pop sensibility. The clear but unpolished recording and sprightly tempos make for high punker appeal, and since it’s only an EP, there’s no opportunity for the energy to lag. If I put this on the turntable, it’s going to get flipped several times before I’m ready to move on. The quality of this fan club issue is also notable, with great sound, sharp reproduction of the artwork, color vinyl, and the addition of two excellent studio tracks from the 2009 CD reissue, bumping the original’s four tracks to six. If you go deep with gloomy post-punk, I’d snatch this up quickly before it’s gone.

DHK: Mierda de Hardcore 12” (Chijni Records) We’ve been carrying releases from Lima, Peru’s DHK (aka Destruye, Huye, Krea) for a decade and a half now, with the band racking up an impressive discography of albums, EPs, splits, and compilations. As you can probably tell from Mierda de Hardcore’s artwork, DHK has remained true to their mission of crafting Discharge-inspired noise, but unlike may Dis-bands who spend their entire lifespan refining and honing a single idea, Mierda de Hardcore displays DHK’s flexibility and their willingness and ability to find variety within the ostensibly narrow Discharge template. Not that there aren’t moments of pure Discharge worship; “Total Distroy,” for instance, is very similar to Disclose’s “Conquest,” and nails that formula as eloquently as any band who follows in Disclose’s footsteps. But there’s just a lot more to this album, which finds a surprising amount of variation without ever sounding like anything but d-beat raw punk. There are moments that remind me of Skitsystem’s big, barreling rhythms, others that slow things down and lean toward stench-core, and still others that sound more like straightforward hardcore than anything firmly in the Dis-camp. DHK isn’t afraid to throw in a mid-paced part or a rhythmic change-up either, which keeps the album sounding aggressive and punk, never settling into the kind of overly familiar or comfortable groove that can cause a d-beat record to lose its edge. While these distinctions might be lost on the unslaughtered ear, true heads will appreciate the space DHK has carved out in this crowded lane. Also, collectors should note Mierda de Hardcore is a numbered of edition of 300, most of which were sold on the band’s 2026 European tour.

Amdi Petersens Armé: Discography 12" (Havoc Records) DIY hardcore’s retrospective lens turns it attention to the new millennium, and Havoc Records skims the cream right off the top with this discography LP from Denmark’s Amdi Petersens Armé. As I remember it, there were three things that happened in relatively quick succession around 2001-02 that changed everything for me. The first was seeing Japan’s Total Fury on their first US tour. They were the first band I ever saw whose members all dressed as if it were still 1982, and their record and live show were both incredible. The second was Amdi Petersens Armé’s first 7” and US tour (which I sadly didn’t catch… I’m still bummed about it to this day). The third was seeing Direct Control for the first time, which meant this new (old) thing was happening in my neck of the woods and not just in distant, far-off lands. I don’t think I can accurately convey how revolutionary Amdi Petersens Armé’s scratchy guitar sounds and simple, catchy riffs felt at that time. I had been going to gigs for five or six years at that point, and while most of what I was listening to during that time was nominally punk rock, in retrospect it had so many trappings of the bloated era of 70s rock that preceded punk: (comparatively) lavish studio production, (again, comparatively) technical and precise musicianship, slick and professional presentation and marketing, etc. Then, just as the Sex Pistols did in ’76, a new wave of bands like Amdi Petersens Armé called bullshit, wiped the slate clean, and took everything back to its most basic and immediate form. For me, it felt revolutionary, and these bands not only changed the records I bought, but also changed the way I dressed, the way I talked, my politics, and many other aspects of my identity. Amdi Petersens Armé’s music has never really left my turntable in the 25 years since, and revisiting this discography LP in 2026, it sounds just as powerful as it did back then. APA wrote great fucking songs, and if you’re not skanking to “Stalinjugend” or “Skate & Dø,” then we have very different ideas about what makes for great hardcore punk. I’m sure a cynical person could say APA’s music was rendered redundant by the legions of similarly-minded groups who came in their wake (not to mention the early 80s originators who preceded them), but I’d counter that there’s something ineffable in these songs that inspires and captures the imagination. There’s a reason the tracks collected here were ground zero for a whole sub-scene that has flowered repeatedly over the two and a half decades since APA called it quits. While thousands of young punks have been inspired by APA’s music after listening to crappy youtube rips, Havoc Records gives the band an appropriate epitaph by repressing this discography LP, which originally came out on the Danish label Hjernespind in 2013. The LP is beautifully produced, capturing all the band’s essential tracks alongside a huge 32-page booklet full of photos, flyers, and other scene ephemera. The 2013 pressing was downright impossible to get in the States; I wanted one desperately when it came out, but even someone as record-mad as myself couldn’t nail down a copy. (When I finally came across one in a Helsinki used bin in 2025, I snatched it right up.) I imagine that if, like me, you’ve been lusting after this record for more than ten years, you’ve already picked up your copy. For the rest of you, snag this while you can and enjoy getting acquainted with one of the best bands hardcore has ever given us.

Yambag: The Psycho 7" (Convulse Records) Here at Sorry State we’ve been in the tank for Cleveland’s Yambag since they started, and the 8 songs in 8 minutes on The Psycho aren’t doing anything to change that. Yambag has always sounded unique to me in how they work blastbeats into the old school USHC style; at their best (which is most of the time), they sound like Group Sex-era Circle Jerks partying with side B of Scum-era Napalm Death. While the riffs and vocals are as catchy as ever, what really stands out to me on The Psycho is how deft and memorable those trademark rhythmic change-ups are. Like the Circle Jerks, Yambag can make a choppy rhythm into a song’s central hook. Just check out the snare rolls in the verses of “Buried Alive” or the stops in the chorus of “Cult-ure;” it’s hard to imagine the songs without them, and those moments send the energy level through the roof. The fact that they’re also the first two songs means that The Psycho is a wildly careening ride, like one of those roller coasters that starts by jolting you immediately from a dead stop to top speed, throwing you into a maze of unexpected twists, turns, and rolls that never allow you to get your bearings. And then when the blasting parts hit, it’s like you’ve Kool Aid Man-ed through a brick wall and the rubble is raining down on you… but you love it! If you’ve been on the Yambag ride for a while, there’s no reason to get off now. If you haven’t checked them out and you like the fast shit, prepare to get leveled.

KLONNS: G.A.M.E.S. 12" (Iron Lung Records) Iron Lung Records brings us the second album from this Tokyo band that, across a bulging discography packed with numerous EPs, has landed on a unique style. On 2022’s Crow 7” (also released on Iron Lung), Klonns had a crusty vibe, but that’s mostly absent on G.A.M.E.S., which sounds to me like a fusion of two sounds I never would have thought to put together. On one hand, KLONNS sounds to me like they pull a lot from the tougher end of post-Death Side Japanese hardcore from the late 90s and early 2000s. I’m thinking of bands like Tetsu-Arrey, AI, and Clown, all of whom played music based on the Burning Spirits vibe, but with a sense of menace that—even if it isn’t true—makes it sound like the bands could be connected to the Yakuza. G.A.M.E.S. has a similar air of menace, but interestingly KLONNS eliminates the slightly rocked out, Motorhead-esque riffing that is such a staple of the Burning Spirits sound, which makes them sound even tougher and scarier. KLONNS’ other key influence here is from the breakdown-focused end of modern hardcore, where nearly every song climaxes with a crushing, pit-clearing mosh part. Being too close to too many windmills and spin kicks in my life has made me generally wary of this mode of hardcore, but even the most vehement anti-mosh activist must acknowledge KLONNS’ way with a mid-paced riff. Their riffing is very catchy in general, but some of those mid-paced parts are just so memorable. And when they do the whole, “play the riff again, but slower” thing? Fuhggedaboutit… it sounds like people are going to die. This combination of influences may be too much for the purists, but KLONNS has hit on something that feels genuinely new and they execute it here with style and power.