Self-released back in 2009 on their Streetcleaner label, 1,000 lucky punters got themselves a vinyl copy of 14 minutes of unrelenting, grinding hardcore. Southern California’s Nails are just like Black Breath, Trap Them and Magrudergrind; they all take a lot of metal influence (thrash or otherwise) and play loud, play fast, or not at all.

Adorning the LP cover as an adorable black and white image of an unknown person hanging themselves in a true crusty/black metal DIY way. It appears to be referencing Swiss extreme metal band Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death, a two-piece demo collection that had a considerable influence on the emerging black and death metal scenes. And in a refreshing way these days, the band have skipped that whole myspace bullshit and tried to promote themselves by a partly broken label website. Word of mouth has possibly been the key to being picked up by Southern Lord.

In the same way this LP is short, when asked what the album’s driving force, frontman Todd Jones simply replied “depression, anger, selfishness and love”. It is strange to hear how love can fit into such a barbaric sounding album with such indecipherable lyrics. Anyway, short bursts of feedback lead from one chugging track to another d-beat smasher in an almost one-take, 14 minute track. You only need to hear to first 15 seconds of opener ‘Conform’ to judge which way this album will take you. If you have any interest in the bands I mentioned at the beginning then it will instantly click with you. If you don’t, then you will probably want to turn it off and not ever listen to it again. I can’t stop listening to it.