Review: Double standards, unreliability, flakiness, and the bittersweet nature of nostalgia all play their part in Koyo's confident and rightly acclaimed debut album. The Long Island hardcore-punk set picked up nods from all the right places when they first bestowed this on the world in 2023, and listening back almost 12 months on the impact hasn't really waned. Bursting from the starting blocks as they evidently meant to go on, even the record's first sort-of-downtime, 'Flatline Afternoon', doesn't really let the intensity slip, with similarly half-time numbers such as 'Message Like A Bomb' making it clear Koyo seem incapable of making bland or uneventful music. Perhaps not cutting out any new paths for the genre as such, nevertheless the precision accuracy of what's here bears the mark of greats in the making.
Review: Returning with their follow up to 2022's exceptional high watermark Hygiene, the fifth full-length from Albany, New York based post-hardcore heroes Drug Church promises to be their most introspective and scathing work to date. Initially formed as a side-project to frontman Patrick Kindlon's Self Defence Family, while guitarist Nick Cogan would soon find himself equally busy with his side-project turned hardcore megastars Militarie Gun, the seasoned veteran status of all core members allows their compositions to sonically weave through the intersectionality of their musical backgrounds. Coalescing the jagged aggression of Black Flag with the frenetic grunge of Mudhoney, while offering crunching nods to Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer and especially Pixies, with regard to Kindlon's constant to-and-froing from absurdist shrugs to unhinged displays of utter terror, Prude promises Drug Church's reliable brand of accessibility and aggression, only with both ends of the spectrum maximalised to the point of ouroboros self-devourment. This is the RevHQ exclusive variant, limited to just 300 copies pressed on yellow and black splattered wax.
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