by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Set to release their fourth full length album in five years (not to mention a slew of EPs), London’s USA Nails have become one of the decade’s most reliable noise rock bands, each album a bit more corrosive while turning the screws ever tighter. Life Cinema, due out May 10th via Hex Records (Great Sabatini, Null, Grizzlor) and Dipped in Gold Recordings (Mush) is the band at the height of their menacing intelligence, a balance of furious noise punk brawn and tangled post-hardcore brains. It’s rough and ragged but captured in vivid detail, each pummeling riff and blast of atonal feedback adding to their sordid melodic structures, the results dense and heavy but approachable and full of unlikely hooks.
Second single “Creative Industries” is a dizzying blast of stampeding rhythms, that glorious noise rock bass tone, and swarming guitars that threaten to swallow everything whole. Everything rattles together in an unholy union, building a wall of impenetrable immersion, the unhinged eye of the storm. As with any USA Nails song, Steven Hodson’s vocals are shouted with a raw spoken intensity, capturing a sarcastic bent as he yelps, “lip goes up, teeth goes down” as just another smiling face while others do the talking. The chorus (somehow) revs up in intensity as the howl, “Instant this. Instant that. You’re instant nothing” before ultimately declaring “I don’t want no more. We don’t want no more.”