Now playing; Guilty Pleasure, Hitbox - EP, Kfcmc
This will be our year, took a long time to come.
I went from connecting to basically no new music in 2021 to drowning in it this year. Halle-fucking-lujah. A crop of bands are beating down the gates brandishing all of the unclaimed ideas nu-metal left behind when it fizzled out somewhere around 2007. I’m not grading any of these, as fun as it may be to assign a nice tidy letter to something these are too new and too raw. Assume they’re all A’s. And are absolutely worth your time and money.
Guilty Pleasure, Cheem [2022, Lonely Ghost]
If you’ve been inside the Kirk-o-sphere for a little while now you’re probably aware that I am physically incapable of shutting up about this yet everytime I worry I’m overhyping these nine songs I put it on and the damn thing floors me all over again. Packing a few albums worth of ideas into 22 minutes, Cheem effortlessly tightrope between acerbic taunts and musical ecstasy. Guilty Pleasure is the rush of realizing you’ve done it; you’ve transformed inspiration into delivery, synthesized influence into something brand new, totally your own, and damn near perfect. Their 2016 debut album was called Making a Planet and now they have. Guilty Pleasure doesn’t imagine the future of nu-metal, it simply is.
Hitbox - EP, hitbox [2022, Killmilord]
Some bands have marketing, hitbox have song titles. Their debut EP has six of them, all of which more effective than any ad campaign. “My Hitbox Is Super Small So Use a Big Gun (feat. 4Giv),” “Alucard Is Just Dracula Backwards and You're F*****g Draining Me,” and the irresistible “I Watch Jimmy Kimmel Every Night In Hopes That One Day He'll Get What He F*****g Deserves.” The music therein, which is something like slowcore Skinlab or - as Brooklyn Vegan stated and hitbox have proudly represented in their Twitter bio - “lofi Slipknot.” Each of these tracks are so consistently brutal and lyrically indecipherable it becomes something like ambient music if Brian Eno was more interested in slaughterhouses than airports. During my most recent listen the alarm clock I had forgot to snooze went off, I assumed it was apart of the song. I mean that as a compliment.
Kfcmc, KFC Murder Chicks [2022, Psneaky]
Towards the very end of breakbeat powered full metal assault “Id” KFC Murder Chicks foreground a woman shrieking in mortal terror, a sound so impossibly loud as to be near unlistenable, exhilarating and terrifying in equivalent measure. It’s an emblematic moment for Kfcmc, the brightest gem in the ever more promising cybergrind pile. Two parts evil disco, one part thrash and a fatal dose of musique concrète- Kfcmc is packed with “holy shit” moments when the floor opens up and you tumble into the abyss. My favorite is when “Half Life” goes from titanic metal to laser light techno before welding the two together then formatting it to digital oblivion. The whole shhbang is so powerful you won’t know what to do; dance or roll your eyes back and twitch. Maybe both?