What's new?

If you follow what's new in contemporary crust, you will have heard of Montreal's PORTAL TOMB and their Last Frost Demo released on Sore Mind last year. I started a Signal group with Aíne and Ava to chat about the band. ...

Slime punk, egg punk, egg. Chain wave, chain punk, and, eventually, inevitably, similarly, just chain. Does this help? Make more sense? No no no, just keep throwing some shit at the wall so every review sounds like a sales pitch and every band is a camel comprised of diametric sonic interests. D-beat, kang, raw, D-beat raw, UK82; female fronted, fast hardcore, fastcore; Devocore (that's a thing! The author's sweating!) Oh, good grief, let's not turn this first outing of mine into a referendum o...

CONDUMB’s S/T debut ep does something that I think is nearly impossible: sound very good and very noisy at the same time. Everything is balanced and shines while a layer of high gain covers the whole thing. Trish, who also plays guitar, did a great job recording this (as well as everything else of hers that I’ve heard). The bass is punchy and helps drive the entire ep, the drums are solid and straight forward in a way that props up the riffs instead of distracts from them. When I sent this to a ...

BRUTE is a very appropriate name for this band. Hardcore leaning into powerviolence from Vancouver that sounds like it was written by primitive humans and I mean that in the very best way. Is it recorded perfectly or horribly, you have to decide for yourself. Based on the artwork I assume this is or will soon be out on tape and honestly I'd be a bit afraid that the tape will destroy my tapedeck from too much sand in the casing. Caution the intro to BBG may have a drastic effect on your ability ...

I think a lot about the way things get lost: band shirts that evaporate, ignored buildings demolished after you leave the neighbourhood, faint acquaintances delete their social media and you never see them again, digitally or otherwise. Almost all punk demos are like this: tossed off to niche audiences in limited quantities, uploaded to incredibly fragile file sharing sites, and usually eventually abandoned for lack of interest by either the band, the audience or both. This article lines up rou...

A new printable zine PDF as been added to the zine distro: NO BRAINS #3. Also added the newest MRR Reviews digest for Issue #501. Download these zines, print some copies, and distro them at shows! The Directory has also been updated with a few additions and more categories. For example there is now a Calendars category with all the online show calendars we know about. If you know of one we are missing (or anything else!) please get in touch....

Recently I was in NYC and stopped by Peace Of Mind HQ where I was gifted a few of their recent releases. Willow filled my bag with copies to take home, exclaiming "we don't care about making money, we just want to put our friends bands and get their music out there." Besides the LOVE AND COMPASSION tape, everything I was given has not yet been reviewed here. So, I present a roundup review: MMI - Imminently Perilous To Life Demo Tape As of writing, the newest Peace Of Mind release. Opens with ...

Ghas of A World Divided bring us this interview with Charged Can, founder of Wargasm Records/Fest based in Istanbul. Ghas: Hey Can! Tell us about your current projects, I know you’ve been busy! Charged Can: Hi Ghas, DIE IN VAIN and REASON WHY, my two sibling bands! Happy to involve with those bands because we're doing our favorite two era of punk rock. G: I saw that you have been touring across Europe in the last few weeks. Can you tell us about that? CC: Yes! We were on tour with DIE IN VAI...

Hardcore punk should make you feel like you're losing brain cells with every passing second. And let me tell you this POISON SPEAR release has my brains leaking out my ear while the grin on my face gets more deranged. No gimmicks, no complicated riffs and snotty but guttural vocals make zero compromises. Plus the title track Institutional Trust is a drawn out mosh part that'll have you slamming from side to side, getting low and slow or getting swept up in the feverish sweaty energy of an overca...

Hailing from the gloomy western lowlands of Glasgow, WARBITCH brings us just over 15 minutes of metal punk chaos. Clear and concise gravely vocals bludgeon us with adages of nuclear fallout, the horrors of war, and the eternal wheels of oppression grinding our bones. WARBITCH takes the blistering attitudes of "war bad" raw punk and brings an element of metal that will likely keep the HM-2 distortion fans happy. There's even a breakdown midway through "radiation zombie" that adds a bit of tempo v...

January 2025 marked Maximum Rocknroll's 500th "Issue". The print run of MRR ended with Issue #432 in May 2019, but online "Issues" are still published on the Maximum Rocknroll website. Every months-worth of reviews are still batched together on the site and given an issue number. Print issues have also had all their reviews digitized on the site and organized by issue. If you didn't know, you should check out their archive of reviews! I've been working on this quietly for a few months, but in h...

Courtesy of the punks in Dog City, USA, we have several new zines you may print out and distribute on the ZINES page. ...