Featured Releases

London Clay: Private View 12” (La Vida Es Un Mus) La Vida Es Un Mus released this full-length debut from London Clay late in 2025, but it seemed to fly under many people’s radars. Which makes sense, I suppose, because Private View is a wallflower of a record. While most records burst into the room screaming “LOOK HOW COOL I AM! LIKE ME!,” Private View sulks in the corner intriguingly, reading a book that’s too smart for you, daring you to engage. I contend that Private View is a beautiful, fascinating record, but it reveals itself slowly. The notes I made while listening to Private View are full of words like “smudged,” “smeared,” and “blurred,” and when you compare London Clay with the crispness of groups like Modem or Fatamorgana (ostensibly similar bands, in that they feature feminine vocals and primarily electronic instruments), the difference is striking. With those artists, the beats are insistent and the melodies are crystalline, so clear it’s like they beamed them straight into your brain. But there’s something tantalizing about the way London Clay buries their melodies in distortion and delay and the way the singer murmurs into the microphone like she’s afraid of being overheard. The object of my desire—that glorious pop nugget that lies just below the surface of these songs—drifts in and out of focus, but lives mostly in a space that’s just out of reach. On “Faraday” it’s right there, while “Clifton Rise” teases you for nearly five minutes before it delivers its blissed-out, shoegaze-y crescendo. And then there’s “The Obelisk,” a patience-testing eight-minute track (song? piece of musique concrète?) whose rhythm track loops a screeching 70s/80s-era dot matrix printer… the song makes me feel like I’m trapped in an office that doubles as an outer circle of hell. The handful of similar records I can think of—the Fall’s Dragnet, SPK’s early singles, the new Puppet Wipes album from last year—also have their difficult moments, and those moments are important. By pushing you away with “The Obelisk,” “Clifton Rise” shines that much brighter. The packaging extends this aesthetic beautifully, particularly the half-size zine that accompanies the vinyl. Page after page of mostly text-less collages grounded in the Crass / Poison Girls aesthetic (and similarly beautiful), but with a Situationist-like inscrutability. So, if you’re the kind of uncomplicated person who can get out of your own head and just enjoy a dumb pop tune, then maybe Private Viewisn’t for you. But if you’re a worrier, if you like arty films, and if your most valued experiences with art tend to start with disorientation, then maybe it’s worth making space in your life for London Clay.

System Maintains: 3 Song Demo cassette (Sex Field Abomination) One of the most exciting new labels in recent memory—Richmond’s Sex Fiend Abomination—brings us a short but brilliant 3-song demo by this punky metal band from Charlotte, North Carolina. This tape dropped digitally a couple of months ago, and from the moment I hit play I was enthralled. I mean, the band says it all when they describe themselves as “your sketchy uncle’s Metallica and Bathory tapes played through a wrecked boombox,” but that pithy description doesn’t get at how unique that combination is and how great System Maintains is at throwing the right ingredients into the cauldron to create this poisonous brew. Regarding the “broken boombox” part, the production here is a perfectly vintage-sounding, fuzzy scrawl akin to what contemporary punk bands who record on 4-track are producing… imagine the blown-out roar of Cicada or Shaved Ape, but metal. When the whole band plays at full intensity, it bleeds together into a wall of fuzz, but there’s enough room in the production for the key riffs and vocal lines to stand out, particularly since the songs are often arranged so those parts get highlighted as instrumental breaks. As for the songs and riffs themselves, they are fucking killer. I had an epiphany at the gym after listening to this tape like 5 times in a row and pondering how they can write such great riffs… then it hit me: the killer riff that starts “Final War,” the first song on the tape, is just a slightly reworked version of the intro to Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And then the riff they play immediately after that—which also totally shreds—I’m pretty sure I recognize from a D.R.I. song. Some people might worry about this, but not me. As I like to say, there are only 12 notes, and I don’t need every band to reinvent the wheel. Even if there is source material for some of these riffs, the way System Maintains absorbs them into their neck-deep vibe—and creating that vibe is, I think, the real standout strength of this demo—completely transforms them. This is just thrilling, and by the time its 5-minute runtime is up, I’m so stoked that the only thing I can think to do is play it again… and again, and again…

Nightfeeder / Verdict: Död Åt Tyranner 12" (Phobia Records) When I saw this split announced, I was immediately like, “oh fuck… this is going to be really good.” The recipe here is promising: two veteran bands operating at the height of their powers, playing music that’s very much in the same vein, but each band having their respective idiosyncrasies that give them a signature style. The pairing is inspired, but do the tracks live up to expectations? Yes, my friend, they do. In fact, I can’t get over how fucking great this split is. I should probably buy two copies because I can see right now I’m going to wear a hole in this thing, and if it doesn’t land near the top of my “Best of 2026” list, it will have been a very good year for hardcore punk indeed. First up, the Nightfeeder side. I have loved every single Nightfeeder release thus far, but I’m tempted to say the eight tracks they contribute to this split are the best thing they’ve done yet. It’s not as if they shake up the formula. As ever, their presentation is super unpretentious, the songs light on bells and whistles and with the focus firmly on the rock-solid, meat-and-potatoes riffing. Those riffs are so perfectly constructed that it feels like they have existed for a million years, and were they arranged in the simplest possible fashion—four of the verse riff, four of the chorus riff, repeat and stop—the songs would already be stellar. (Especially given the absolutely perfect d-beat drumming here, which varies the tempo to keep things interesting yet never stops dripping with groove.) Nightfeeder is way, way too good to half-ass things, though. They know the meat and potatoes are the stars of the show, but the flavor can be maximized with a subtle mix of spices. I have a feeling I’ll be noticing the little touches in these songs for many months and years to come, but off the top of my head there’s: the way the vocals sometimes devolve into inchoate scream on tracks like “Climbing the Walls;” the noisy, Discharge-style chorus on “Cursed Ruins;” the “you-think-you’re-gonna-slam-but-you’re-not” mosh riff teases in “Dragged Beneath” and “Born to Suffer;” the huge vocal hook in the chorus to “Born to Suffer;” the thrashy riffing in “Life’s Fool Pit” (a complex song by Nightfeeder standards with a lot more parts than usual, but they fit together perfectly); the outro of “Launch Codes” when the drums start playing backward. Man, this shit is just PERFECT. Verdict has a lot to live up to on their side of the split, but they meet the moment and deliver what might be their best material too. While Nightfeeder’s tracks lean more restrained and groovy, Verdict emphasizes speed, their tracks generally faster than Nightfeeder’s, with rhythms that are unimpeachably tight, yet slightly ahead of the beat, thrillingly riding that line between chaos and control. The more crowded mix places the focus on the manic speed, but when you listen closely, you realize Verdict are also masters of the riff… in fact, the riffs in songs like “War on the Streets” and “Never Ending Struggle” are so prototypical that you could imagine them as Nightfeeder songs just as easily as Verdict songs. One area where Verdict is unmatched, though, is their talent for crafting breakdowns and mid-paced parts. It’s so hard to work a breakdown into a d-beat song without sounding cheesy, but “I’m Not Built to Last” and “End All This Crap” are textbook examples of how to do it right. And the fully mid-paced track “Narcissistic Piece of Shit?” GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. I’m dead. I really can’t get over how great this split is. Every time I finish a side, I think, “this side rules!” Then I play the other side and think, “this side rules!” Then I go back to the first side and think, “this side rules!” It’s an infinite loop I wouldn’t mind getting lost in forever.

Direct Order ‘82: Demo cassette (Crosshair Records) New Jersey’s Direct Order ’82 lay it all out there for you with their band name on this demo cassette, and those of you looking for a circa-1982 USHC rush won’t be disappointed. 12 songs in 12 minutes, though as with the shining monument of ultra-clipped, minimalist hardcore punk—the Circle Jerks’ Group Sex—there’s a lot more to these sub-minute blasts that initially meets the ear. D.O. ’82 has a couple of ringers in the band—you might know guitarist P.J. from his years in Night Birds, while the singer Tim fronted 90s New Jersey straight edge band Ensign (apologies to the other members whose resumes I don’t know as well)—and they know that a simple verse and chorus is typically not all you need for a compelling song. However, they also know that hardcore punk is all about keeping things to the point, and they toe that line brilliantly here. The riffing is on the hookier end of USHC—I find myself thinking of bands like Social Circkle or even Kid Dynamite—but the songs are so compressed and jagged and the parts come at you so quickly and relentlessly that it’s almost overwhelming… by the time you’re a couple of tracks in, your heart is definitely racing. But, like I said, despite the brevity, the songs are fully fleshed-out… there are a lot of intros that are literally like 1.5 seconds long, and bridges, outros, and other accoutrements that are nearly as brief. (Another highlight is “Leave Me Alone,” which features guitar solos before both verses, and hence reminds me of Bad Religion’s “I Want to Conquer the World,” yet still clocks in at only 59 seconds.) For fans of We Got Power: Party or Go Home, Short Music for Short People, and other hymns for the hyperactive.