In June 2025, and in the moment of listening, Sublux are the greatest hardcore punk band in the world and Disorder In The Machinery by Sublux is the greatest hardcore punk release in the world. Perhaps you think this an implausible statement, about a group who have not released anything prior to this seven-song tape and played but a handful of London support gigs, or think I am engaging in hyperbole for cynical reasons. Be assured I am motivated only by love and seek to translate into prose the deathless excitement I felt on first hearing this EP.
Sublux are a five-piece whose members are or have been in some other good bands – Skitter and Hellish Torment to name two – and, in this assembly, are driven by their marginalised identities and where they intersect. Singer Linsey McFadden and synth player Lula Hoffmann are both wheelchair users, and disability rights/justice is perhaps the most prominent theme in the lyrics: it’s a decidedly under-referenced one in punk (or other genres for that matter), be that from the POV of allies or those living with it.
Ultimately, though, that isn’t what makes Sublux scorch: it’s the songs what do that. More complex and multi-sectioned than your average hardcore arrangement, without threatening indulgence or finesse, there are great cloudy hockles of deathrock lobbed into anarcho/pogopunk demolition derbies, Hoffmann adding a whole extra dimension but of like mind with her bandmates (guitarist Shereen Elizabeth, bassist Adrian Alfonso and drummer Camille Fry). And McFadden, playing in her first band that I know of, is a deadly vocalist, her high register as combative as any diaphragmatic cookie monster. Hopefully out physically on the Disforia label by the time you read this, hear Disorder… however you have to.
The only time I wrote about Powerplant in this column before was in an EOY roundup in 2019, the year where their People In The Sun album blew up minorly. Theo Zhykharyev turned it from one man to a band, thanks to a Filofax of London homies, and is now surfin’ solo again, at least on new seven inch ‘Crashing Cars’ (Arcane Dynamics). I can’t call it a Powerplant career zenith, simply because ‘Grass’ from the 2023 EP of the same name exists, but these two songs find Zhykharyev carving out his most distinctive space yet as songwriter and producer alike.
‘Crashing Cars’ is something like synth punk, as Powerplant always has been, but where that has most often been a codeword for low fidelity in recent years, this song uses its electronic elements, including the studio, in a relatively maximalist manner. The rhythm bed is heavy hitting and rap-influenced, the melodies somehow combining new wave jitter and new romantic flounce; it reminds me oddly of this year’s Lust For Youth album, less in precise sound than in its idiosyncratic splicing of modes. B-side ‘Never Smile’ is at least as good: Zhykharyev adopts a graver vocal tone, crudifies the drum machine a tad and cranks out a song that, beneath its tin-shack recording, is built for lovers of Cure/Smiths 80s arena indie.
For an album which was, again, entirely self-performed and recorded, Steröid’s Chainmail Commandos offers an unusual number of angles from which to approach it. It’s the work of Gordo Blackers, an Australian who paints with an eclectic palette: Gee Tee, a garage rock band he played in for about five years, were hitherto most relevant to this column, but factor in his dabblings in basement metal and you get closer to Steröid, which is early 80s NWOBHM-gone-AOR recorded in the quintessential ‘egg punk’ style, with digital drums and pitched-up voice. Crypt Of The Wizard, a London metal label/shop who are clearly hyperaware of scene discourse about authenticity while ultimately choosing to shrug it off, have released it on LP. You might also mention Blackers’ dungeon synth project Quest Master as one which, like Steröid, knows all the ‘real heads’ tropes but embraces the falseness.
Combining signifiers in a precise way that no-one else has previously done is clearly a big part of Steröid’s appeal, while also not the same as being original or innovative per se. Ultimately, I mostly save my expectations of boundary-pushing for other types of music. As for Chainmail Commandos, it’s a hoot, and perfectly executed. Blackers writes great pop-metal riffs with little apparent effort and peels off wheedly solos on ‘Rock Your Own Way’ and ‘Nowhere To Run’ with zit-faced earnestness, and has a strong enough melodic command that you could even reframe this as an (extremely odd) powerpop record.
Levity prevails for at least one more column entry thanks to the debut release by Green Fingers Ltd. from Tbilisi. My ‘in’ with this five-piece band is their singer Danya Saprykin, who used to play drums in screwy hardcore Russians Petlya and who got the fuck out of the country at some opportune moment. The Georgian capital looks like a fun place to play DIY punk and Green Fingers Ltd.’s strongly titled Liminal Safe Space (released jointly by Russian labels Total Slob and Electric Depression, plus Brainwasher from Hamburg) gives the impression they, in turn, enliven it with their unruly sci-fi garage moves and satirical inclinations.
Saprykin, singing in a band for the first time, claims mixed feelings about the experience but his gruff burble is a big boost to Liminal Safe Space’s enjoyment factor. The other is the budget-rock synthesiser, which takes GFL into Spits / Mummies realms while occasionally getting more Radiophonic with it. Tempos are high more often than not, though occasions of sludgy galumph suggest a noiserock fandom which is underlined by ‘True Crime Podcast’ – a portrayal of a shut-in with a taste for prurient media and transgressive art – and its namechecks for Brainbombs and No Trend.
You’ll of course remember (I’m joking) that I listed Wrzask by Traüme as my favourite punk release of 2024 at the end of the year, so best believe I’m jabbing anything related to this Warsaw gothic hardcore group into my arm in the interim. First up is Trzy Piosenki, a tape by Gap, who counted Traüme guitarist Piotr Królikiewicz as one-third of their lineup but seemingly only existed for one week in 2021.
Fortunately, a new London-based tape label called Vigilanza Productions were clucking to get Gap’s six and a half minutes of music heard and I’m glad they succeeded! You get four tracks, titled ‘Intro’, ‘G’, ‘A’ and ‘P’ because proper titles are narcissistic or whatever; ‘Intro’ is actually great, 86 seconds of shoegaze guitar over a heavy hip-hop instrumental that chucks in a sort of proto-jungle breakbeat near the end. This is decidedly unrepeated in what follows – chaotic practise space hardcore with chuggy NYHC breakdowns and belch-and-you’ll-miss-it guitar solos, the sort of thing that prolifierated in the early 2010s via bands like (the still influential) Hoax.
Total Nada from Montreal give the impression of powerful efficiency, not just through their ballistic 80s tape-trader hardcore speedrunning but also the way in which they record and release roughly ten minutes of it every two years. Aquí Y Ahora (Discos Enfermos / 11PM) is their latest dispatch and, without going to the trouble of playing it on some fancy BPM-counting CDJs or some similarly profligate exercise, I do believe that these eight songs include Total Nada’s fastest yet. You think they’ve peaked on the opening title track, its slower parts notwithstanding, then ‘Fallas Cronicas’ immediately trumps it. Then ‘Punto De Lanza’ has a stop-and-go moment precipitating 30 closing seconds of full-on thrash-with-no-metal mania.
Boris Leonardo, originally from Bogotá, sings in Spanish and thus gives Aquí Y Ahora a South American hardcore ambience – so goes the word being put out. If you subbed him for a locally-sourced Anglo/ rancophonic vocalist I’m sceptical that the same associations would be made. (This is a rhetorical question I find myself asking every so often: how much of what’s thought of as nation/continent-specific hardcore styles is actually just down to it being sung in a certain language/accent?) Suffice to say I’m very glad he is on the mic because he’s a veritable hellhound and he’s got a band to match.
And then you’ve got a band like Inmates, who are like the pure id of Cleveland hardcore. They’ve been at it 30 years, on-off, and on new album Role Of God (Iron Lung) have the same lineup as when they started. Most of the members go further back still, via links with Integrity and the Clevo proto-metalcore scene that on the face of it seems way too self-serious to cut about with crude provocateurs like Inmates. A halfway detailed rock family tree would however show them to be totally inextricable (the close-knitness of the community perhaps explained by Cleveland’s population being about the same as Coventry).
Inmates also had/have this dual thing of being all-American shitheads who at the same time crib in spades from first wave Japanese and Swedish hardcore as well as Bristolian gluebag fodder (covering Chaos UK on their first single). Role Of God, their first release since 2018, inches towards metal country, though with the sort of deliciously inexact gallop as Zouo or early GISM, with Paul Schlacter downtuning his larynx for good measure. There are two songs taking shots at pious peers of the vocalist, another about unlearning American/ Western imperialism (‘I Never Questioned’) and, in ‘Doin’ Time’, a tribute to a recently departed friend as heartfelt as Inmates could feasibly muster. “He was an alien from outer space / Just doin’ time in this awful place.”
To the best of my knowledge or recollection, no-one has managed to identify an Irish hardcore ‘sound’, which is probably a net positive. What has been a repeat element in the stuff I’ve liked down the years is a rough-as-arseholes attitude to production: both sides of the Limpwrist / Knifed split EP are legendary, but the latter side makes the former sound practically poptastic. Flower Power, from Dublin, support my theory on their self-titled debut tape, which local label Bend Or Break and Leeds’ Brainrotter have both dubbed editions of.
Five songs, all either slightly over or under one minute and uniformly feral and vile to listen to. The guitar jangles, after a fashion, but less in the service of melody than because the amps/leads/fuses are fritzed; ‘Flower Power’ the song has a little Ron Asheton thing going on, and I think it conceivable that some or all of this quartet dig the more shit-fi pockets of garage punk, but at root this is a genuine outsider sound that doesn’t warrant too much time spent tracing its ancestry. I would though note that of the members’ other bands, Galway’s late Overbite run Flower Power close for aural commotion; on-the-up indie rockers Search Results less so, but it’s a cool double duty they’re pulling.
Kovaa Rasvaa have been a band since 2009 and released records on the Svart label since 2012, including new eight-song, 13-minute EP Tarinaksi Paketoitu Valhe. You don’t really get labels like Svart – whose catalogue ranges from broadly commercial rock music to jazz to no-prisoners hardcore like this Turku four-piece – in more populous countries than Finland, but they do great work in this observer’s opinion, and Kovaa Rasvaa are true-school DIY ragers in the exalted Finnish tradition.
That said, Svart seem to be pitching Tarinaksi Paketoitu Valhe as a crossover thrash record, which feels a bit misleading to me. Save for closing track ‘Sahan Laita’, which is a piano solo for half of its four-minute runtime, Kovaa Rasvaa songs say their piece in under 120 seconds (often far less), don’t really engage in the fretboard-frottage type of metal soloing, and instead bet big on a guitar/bass interplay between Johanna Pirinen and Anne Nordling that’s like deathrock played at kängpunk speed. Otto Itkonen, formerly of 90s Finn-crust perennials Selfish, hasn’t always been a drummer, but has a clatteringly hectic style that leaves you in no doubt you’re listening to a hardcore band.
And finally, a return to something like pop music courtesy of French ensemble Lùlù. In their hands, and as is often the case in Straight Hedge, pop music means handclaps, cowbells, choir-of-angels backing vox and denim jackets. They have a whole LP of this stuff fresh out via three labels (Howlin’ Banana, Dangerhouse Skylab and Taken By Surprise) and it’s high grade catnip for fans of – in rough order of self-evidentness – Sheer Mag, The Number Ones, that Loosey EP I reviewed late last year, Thin Lizzy and early Teenage Fanclub.
Singer Luc Simone alternates between French and Italian, and while you (an adherent to crass national stereotypes, unlike the worldly and sophisticated columnist) doubtless think these the languages of romance and seduction, Simone is a scuff-edged hollerer in the protopunk/junkshop glam tradition. ‘Sonic, Lyon’ is a tribute to Lùlù’s hometown music venue with an almost J Mascis-like guitar part and a time-honoured lyrical conceit: the vocalist has been to many cities, and they’re all special in their own way, but only one contains a structure that will remain pour toujours dans le coeur. Beyond this particular cockle-warmer, Lùlù shines in fleeting moments when guitarist Théo Kael Serre or bassist Sabrina Duval get to carry the momentum on their own, while Fanny Bouland’s powerhouse hi-hat-heavy drum style is just the ticket for this group.
Straight Hedge Mix June 2025 Tracklist
Sublux – ‘Pendulum’
Powerplant – ‘Never Smile’
Steröid – ‘Nowhere To Run’
Green Fingers Ltd. – ‘True Crime Podcast’
Gap – ‘Intro’
Total Nada – ‘Punto De Lanza’
Inmates – ‘Doin’ Time’
Flower Power – ‘Maniac’
Kovaa Rasvaa – ‘Väärä Päätelmä’
Lùlù – ‘Sonic, Lyon’
