Iron Lung
Adapting // Crawling (red)
This, their first album since 2013, is as fierce and uncompromising as we've come to expect from the duo of Jensen Ward and Jon Kortland, who originally bonded over a shared fascination of punishing hardcore and arcane medical barbarism. On this new LP, it's not a funhouse mirror they're holding up - society has devolved into this misshapen, ugly and distorted form, and IRON LUNG take no pleasure in pulling back its curtain. As truth-tellers in this breakneck and unrelenting hardcore tradition, duty commands IRON LUNG to ram their bulldozers, Hanatarash-style, through the tidal waves of horseshit. Extreme hardcore is not a new phenomenon, yet Adapting // Crawling is undoubtedly a vital new fork in its socket. Hearkening back to forebears Despise You and Crossed Out, these eighteen tracks offer distinctly original pathways to obliteration, from the ominous opening blows of "Adapting" to the inspired decision to sandwich the distressing "Virus" between two halves of "Purgatory Dust", a rare piece of art that accurately conjures the monotonous terror of surviving an active pandemic. Their blasts of hardcore/agit-prop are savage and unrelenting, but IRON LUNG somehow manage to imbue the negative space between blasts with an oxygen-destroying heaviness as well, perhaps the defining trademark of this group who once saw their reflection in a full-body pressurized metal chamber and decided to turn it into music. -Matt Korvette