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St Louis, Missouri’s crown jewel of HC - Q - finally squeezes out a follow up record. Since their 2015 ep they have all finished high school but their appetite for destruction still has not been satiated. Crushing hardcore alternating between the DBeat and the breakdown with plenty of that modern day half note riffing (a la Glue, Gag, etc). What will they break next ???
Our take: Second 7” from this St. Louis band. I remember liking their first one just fine, but this newest one is a real head-turner. A lot of the elements that Q uses sound familiar if you’re listening to the best new hardcore coming out—I hear S.H.I.T. / Blazing Eye-style pogo mosh, harsh d-beat, and more traditional US hardcore—but Q have two things going for them that lesser bands don’t. First, they’re great at putting together complex, Gauze-esque arrangements with instruments dropping in and cutting out amid dramatic shifts in tempo. Second, they accentuate this dynamism with a loose and chaotic playing style. This record sounds genuinely unhinged, like it was made by the kind of people who would light a boat on fire. If that sounds like the what you want to listen to you can’t go wrong picking this one up.