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Burned Up Bled Dry: Next Stop… Dead Stop... 12” (Prank Records) Next Stop… Dead Stop… is the debut LP from Fayetteville, Arkansas’ Burned Up Bled Dry. Burned Up Bled Dry has been a band since the 90s, when they toured heavily and released a couple of 7”s, but they went through a long dormant period, getting back together a few years ago and apparently getting right back to work on new material. It’s an unusual timeline for a band to work on, and when you consider that alongside their relative isolation from the national hardcore scene in their deep south locale, perhaps it’s unsurprising that Next Stop… Dead Stop… sounds absolutely nothing like anything else happening in hardcore right now. One of the first things to strike me about Next Stop...is the way it balances musical ambition and maturity with its down-in-the-gutter punkness. The runtime of 26 songs in 25 minutes clues you in this is ripping, but the album isn’t just a string of one-minute ragers. There are a bunch of those, sure, but there are also several ultra-minimal songs (four tracks clock in at less than 15 seconds!), a couple of more stretched out dirge-y or mid-paced songs, and basically all points in between. You have no clue what’s coming at you in the next track, yet as a whole the album feels meticulously composed and sequenced. This makes for some brilliant moments, like when the longest track, “Don’t Care,” finally releases you from its turgid grip after nearly four minutes and the band drops into “Not Your Nightmare,” the album’s catchiest, most fist-pumping punk track. Alongside the wide variation in song length and structure, Burned Up Bled Dry’s palette of sounds and influences is also far wider than most hardcore bands’. I’d say the core of Burned Up Bled Dry’s sound is blasting / grinding crust in the tradition of Extreme Noise Terror, but at least half the music on Dead Stop draws from other wells. I hear elements of hooky, fist-pumping d-beat punk (like the aforementioned “Not Your Nightmare”), OG grindcore (“Death Ruse” could be an outtake from From Enslavement to Obliteration), 90s metallic hardcore (some of the breakdowns wouldn’t be out of place in the early Victory Records catalog), early metalcore (panic chords and warped metal licks that make me think of pre-_Jane Doe_ Converge), and some raw black metal. The distinctions between some of those subgenres are subtle, and maybe some of them aren’t even influences, but listing them gets at how rich and varied Next Stop… sounds. That’s particularly true rhythmically; most bands have two or three gears they can operate in comfortably, but Burned Up Bled Dry is uncommonly dextrous for a hardcore band, and they’re experts at shifting between these gears. Beyond the craftsmanship, though, something about Next Stop… Dead Stop... feels honest and passionate in a way much contemporary punk doesn’t. From the first note, I feel like the band means what they’re saying, that they’re pouring their souls into what they’re doing. So much punk today is overly stylized and beholden to its influences… I often feel like I’m listening past a band’s actual music in order to hear whatever rare Japanese or Scandinavian 7” they’re trying to channel. Burned Up Bled Dry seems to know exactly who they are and what they think of our fucked up world, and it’s hugely refreshing to hear them just let it rip.