Hold tight for some hot new pop and metal sounds, shoehorned into this punk and hardcore column on a subcultural technicality, and because this is my little genre-slippage fiefdom. But first, some textbook Straight Hedge bangbangbang fodder: every general interest music website needs a review of Draümar by Draümar, Oslo hardcore royalty. Static Shock have foisted this LP on us, not too long after doing likewise with the debut 7” by member-related band Assistert Sjølmord, and I’d expect fans of either to like t’other, though they don’t sound the same.
Opening with a short electronic instrumental which Static Shock are saying is a John Carpenter homage – one with jungle breakbeats I might add! – thereafter Draümar play hardcore like strapped-in rockers, but remain untempted by things rockers are known to like, such as garage punk and heavy metal. Juggling clean power chords and off-the-chart mini-solos, guitarist Otto is maybe the standout musician of the three, but Draümar are a tight unit, and vocalist Sig (the Sjølmord loanee) is throatily caustic over ten songs whose imagery can be insular and frostbitten, more often apoplectic – never more so than ‘Norske Våpen’, addressing their country’s arms manufacturing sector.
Recorded in their capital’s pivotal anarchist centre Blitz, the echoes of Norwegian hardcore ring through Draümar even before a cover of ‘Herrene’, by 80s OGs Bannlyst and featuring their singer Finn Erik Tangen. His voice has held up remarkably well, to boot.
B.O.R.N., which can stand for either Belligerent Onslaught Relentless Noise or Birmingham’s Only Real Noise, are from Alabama – i.e. the ‘other Birmingham’ – and the first band from the state reviewed in Straight Hedge, I believe. Historically, it simply has not produced punk rock of any enduring significance or wider recognition to speak of, but whether or not the three members of B.O.R.N. are ploughing a furrow as lonely as that second acronym suggests, their new self-titled EP – eight songs on one side of a 12” – is gloriously nasty insta-headache raw punk that can go bar for bar with just about any band currently hurling this sort of thing out.
From second one until minute eleven, B.O.R.N. is tonally filthy and cavedog-primitive, drummer Evelyn sneaking a few rolling toms of respite in with her monomaniacal thud style and bandmates Jasper and CJ channelling the likes of Confuse with guitar/bass noise blowout. There’s some audaciously screechy, cough-and-they’re-gone solos out of the Anti-Cimex playbook and tinges of blackened Oi! and Boston hardcore, perhaps, in the rhythms and vocals. Bits remind me of a more putrid version of Canada’s Bootlicker, other bits of their opposite-coast countrymen Mutated Void – really digging B.O.R.N. on their own terms the more I cane this one, though.
More one-sided vinyl action, a full 19 minutes this time, and similarly sonically sandblasted. Skumhammer are from London and have turned to two German labels to issue their eponymous debut EP this month: Sonic Raid for the 12”, Breaking The Chains for the tape. It absolutely fucks! It is also, stylistically, at the giddy limits of what I’ll let in here, being a concoction of grinding death metal and bestial black stuff, all clattered out with uproarious inexactitude. That helps its punk credentials, as does two of Skumhammer’s three members being Straight Hedge alums – bassist Bruno Fusco, founder member of Final Dose, and Alec Tullio, who drummed in Maladia and went on to start Casing.
Guitarist Michael Brodsky can also be found in Vacuous, and so maybe gives Skumhammer most of its DM heft. Opening ‘Besieged Holy Bastion’ is the group at their most grandiloquent, in that it’s five minutes long and has a solo where Brodsky slows down rather than speeds up. Conversely, the time changes on ‘Grave Rot Vortex’ are announced like an axe through the door, with the trio maybe giving off early-wave Swedeath vibes more than anything here. And Skumhammer by Skumhammer concludes with a song called ‘Skumhammer’… as is platonically ideal.
A rare repeat review is granted to freakcore dons Flower Power of Dublin, not specifically because their debut tape from last year electroded my head (though that helps) but because their return – again on cassette – is shared with a newer still band, northern England’s Wasted Harvest. There are two labels doing runs of the release: Bend Or Break from Drogheda have Wasted Harvest on the A-side, Factory Floor from Liverpool have Flower Power on theirs. Though you shall of course listen in full each time!
Wasted Harvest are on a psych/HC tip something like Richmond’s Black Button (on record) and Leeds’ Pleasure (live). They supply three relatively short numbers followed by a six-minuter titled ‘Jam’, and jam it does, though their leanings in that department are hinted at in the Lee Ranaldo-ish guitar found on ‘Thought Control’ and the wah pedal frottage on ‘Check In’. Tempos are altered for fun and with regularity: successful moshing to this band will require all your bobbing and weaving abilities.
We get a quarter-hour of Flower Power, which I’m listening to with the recently acquired knowledge this is a solo project on tape (the four-piece grouping is for playing live), and certainly it wouldn’t take much to convince me that its sound, like a hardcore punk recreation of when a bird gets trapped in your house, is indeed the blurred vision of one madman. These eight songs are a bit heavier and more downtuned than the debut tape and recent followup EP Raw Power, which initially makes them sound (relatively) more conventional, but all told Wasted Harvest are at least equalled for speed, distortion and dissonance.
We will return to Dublin, but first we’re returning to Oslo for a six-song tape by AG-3, their second. No clue why I skipped the first one they did, at the arse end of 2024, seeing as the never-missing Brainrotter label stuck it out and it’s very much the sort of anti-finesse hardcore whirlwind I’m a sucker for. Covert Strike – co-released by Brainrotter, Poland’s Big.S and Oslo’s own AEKS – is noisy without being noise punk, rides the beat without it being a D-beat and menaces without being any kinda tough-guy (or -gal) situation.
AG-3 are definitely embedded in their local scene, with members also featuring in the crustier Teppebombe and the frankly ska punk Hudkreft, but I don’t hear the olde Norse influences filter into Covert Strike like on the Draümar LP. Perhaps helped by Leah Røkke’s vocals being delivered with the kind of force that swamps one’s natural accent, I could imagine this having come from, say, the current Pittsburgh scene or the bands associated with Bogotá’s Rat Trap collective. I think of stuff like this as ‘modern-sounding’ hardcore, as it goes, despite there being little to nothing tying it explicitly to the ‘20s in terms of technology, aesthetic or sentiment.
Scud, from Melbourne, had already popped a couple of tapes out on a label I like (Noise Merchant), but again I’m strolling in late to say that Dirt, their latest one, is fine boisterous garage punk with essence of Aussie post-pub noise rock squawk. They have two guitarists, Maiya Shirakawa and Luke Summerell, which renders this EP’s sound heavy enough to sabotage most hints of accessibility – as it’s not like there aren’t hooks here, heavens no, and neither am I discounting the vision of Scud singer Ella Darling having a big outdoor festival crowd in the palm of her proverbial hand while repeating “Do you see yourself in the POISON?” (‘Glyphosate’).
Darling has that time-honoured Australian punk vocal style where she seems to be simultaneously speaking, singing and shouting. ‘Snake In A Hole’ exemplifies this, but ‘Dirt Eater’, with its jagged, hardcore-adjacent bassline and lyrics expressing a wish to be turned worm, as it were (“no more back pain!”), is where Scud really hit their groove. Dirt finishes with ‘Weed Slayer’, which sounds like the Meat Puppets when they do country rock, up to and including the noisy outro.
Another month, another demo tape from some new punks from Shrewsbury. It’s a modern phenomenon! Yes, as with a lot of these unusually productive small town scenes, one reason there are so many bands per head is because many heads play in two or more bands, but who reaps the spoils all the same? That’s right, you and I.
Crystal Ball, like the rest of their Salop siblings, don’t care to attach their names to their releases or general business. I believe there to be involvement of people from murky hardcore band Weo and 2010s-era powerviolence pushers Mangle (from Leicester, where Crystal Ball recorded this demo), though that has little sonic relevance to the four portions of ornery tinnitus punk we get here. It’s simple and direct, yet there’s a lot going on, some of it almost paradoxical. Something about it feels very Australian, actually, tracing a line from the Saints to X to Punter with midpaced arrangements that could probably bear a horn section with a different recording but feels just the ticket with its overdriven psych-not-psych guitar tone. ‘Die Laughing’, though not the longest song on the tape, carries itself the most like ‘an epic’, weirdly making me think of High Vis if they listened to the Stooges a lot more and Oasis a lot less.
Music City return us to Dublin, as promised, with a debut album (Welcome To Music City, via Redundant Span) largely comprising the sort of apple-cheeked guitar pop which prefigures punk. The solo songwriting project of Conor Lumsden, he debuted Music City in 2018 with a 45 on Static Shock, several years drumming in The Number Ones behind him; if The Number Ones are, in essence and end result, punks indulging their power pop side, Lumsden strips out almost all those rough surfaces for a dreamy suite packing strings and handclaps aplenty.
Welcome To Music City couldn’t have been recorded without a supporting cast, nor could that cast have been drawn purely from Lumsden’s DIY punk peer group. His rhythm section were formerly in The Strypes, briefly notable for being Elton John’s favourite teenage blues-rock band; at the other end of the spectrum, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh plays viola in decidedly less experimental fashion than her average. Somewhere in the middle, Leigh Arthur (ex of the great Sissy) sings lead on new wave heartland rocker ‘Pretty Feelings’, a re-recording of Music City’s debut single – and Sheer Mag’s Tina Halladay dials in for ‘Common Sense’, the first song released from the album. This is kind of awkward, in that its T. Rex/Faces/Royal Trux triangulation basically smokes everything else on here. Conversely, and though Welcome To… could probably do with being ten minutes shorter, it’s got a high hit rate. That those hits are more likely to remind you of Badfinger, the Carpenters, Elliott Smith and late-period Manics than anything commonly invoked in Straight Hedge is for you to take on board as you wish.
Abrasive and pliant textures combine to strong effect on the debut tape from Top Shortage, likewise directly-communicated fury and allegorical deep thought. The group, who have been playing live since late 2023, are from east Oxford (geographical precision theirs) and release Contre Nature through Divine Schism. Their take on post punk can be melodic, even prettily so, but various factors – from a jabbing, needling rhythmic approach to Noa Laqueche’s dramaturgical vocal to a running theme of confrontational queerness – combine to ensure these five songs are rarely easy on the ear for long.
‘Susan Stryker’, the first song released from the EP, gives a pretty clear picture of where Top Shortage are at: guitarist Harris Ferguson refashions a brisk, C86-type jangle into something more like Midwest emo, whereas the lyrics appropriate an essay by the American gender theorist named in the title, with her blessing. ‘Toi’, one of two songs where Laqueche sings in her native French, is instrumentally spartan until the punked-up closing quarter punctures its slowcore tendencies; ‘Conserve Your Momentum’ is short, fast and shouty, and ‘Lourde’, which reminds me of about four different takes on early 80s post punk, is my concluding highlight of a very likeable introduction to a distinctive band.
Live 1982 (Outer Battery) is the first ever official album-length in-concert document of Void, Maryland oddities whose absorption into the early 80s Washington DC hardcore scene spawned an extreme but in time wildly influential sound. Comprising two sets in the American capital, both recorded by Tom Lyle from Government Issue, the label have dropped a bollock by realising, after the fact, that the A-side is actually a July 1983 show (which Dischord Records have released a couple of segments from before, too) – a bit of a ‘the one thing we didn’t want to happen’ deal.
Erroneous title aside, it’s a nicely assembled package, especially if you get the version with the booklet of Void photos and flyers (collected in print for the first time, I think), and sounds like the post-adolescent genius chaos it was – adlibs, mic grabs, muffed intros and all. Bubba Dupree’s guitar playing is as spiritually improv as John Weiffenbach’s vox are proto-black metal, and for long stretches of the actually-in-82 B-side, it’s like you’re there at the bottom of a very big dogpile but also tripping so hard you think you’re playing air guitar on top of a mountain. Save maybe for Discharge, Void are likely the single band most frequently worshipped in the music I write about here, and these twin documents are part of the puzzle as to why.
Straight Hedge Mix March 2026 Tracklist
Draümar – ‘Atomvinter II’
B.O.R.N. – ‘The Farm’
Skumhammer – ‘Seraphim Regicide’
Wasted Harvest – ‘Thought Control’
AG-3 – ‘EXR’
Scud – ‘Dirt Eater’
Crystal Ball – ‘Brilliant Day’
Music City – ‘Common Sense’
Top Shortage – ‘Lourde’
Void – ‘Think’
