Gag: Still Laughing 12"

Following up 2016's "America's Greatest Hits", GAG are back with 12 certified fresh bangers that will leave you breathless and sweaty. All the mid-tempo thump, crisp searing riffs and maniacal vocal pepper you've come to love are there in full steel but the crew has turned up a couple surprises for you here as well. I won't spoil it by writing more about it, you'll just have to check it out for yourself. Trust GAG, trust Iron Lung Records and, most importantly, go trust yourself.

Our take: Olympia’s Gag were the toast of the early 2010s; I remember watching them play an explosive set at the final Chaos in Tejas back in 2013, they released a series of killer EPs that led up to 2015’s America’s Greatest Hits LP, and that’s the last we heard from them. I’d assumed they’d dissolved, but a promo tape surfaced last year and now we have a new full-length. Thankfully, not much has changed in the intervening five years. One thing that set Gag apart from the beginning was their catchy, mid-paced riffing style. While a lot of hardcore bands have the ambition of playing as fast as possible and others play with dynamic tempo changes, Gag had this way of locking into a heavy, fist-pumping groove that made dance floors explode. That’s the m.o. for Still Laughing… mosh for weirdos, music made for you and your friends to crash into each other in a sweaty basement. Another thing that carries over from Gag’s earlier releases is a quirky, artsy aesthetic, which comes out in the band’s strange artwork (Still Laughing is a doozy), but also surfaces in their music, like on the minimal synth outro, “Scorpion Sequence.” Five years can be an eternity in hardcore, but Still Laughing proves that Gag’s approach hasn’t aged a bit.