by Ann Hoekstra
Nekra have been at this for almost ten years now, which in hardcore terms is closer to a lifetime than a career. The London band's first EP came out on La Vida Es Un Mus back in 2020, and Is It Really Living? is only the proper follow-up — five songs, eight minutes, no filler and no room for any. That gap says something about the record itself: this isn't a band chasing momentum. It's a band that waited until it had something worth saying, then said it as fast as possible.
What's immediately clear is how little of the fury here feels performed. Opener "Intro/ Bad Bitch Stomp" doesn't ease into anything — it's already at full sprint by the second bar, and the record barely lets up from there. Spooky Ruño's vocals sit somewhere between a bark and a chant, less concerned with melody than with getting a point across before the next riff runs it over. Kai Stone's bass and Paula Darias' drums do the actual demolition work underneath, while Alexandra Graves’ guitar keeps finding new corners to detonate. It's a tight, unfussy sound, more interested in impact than in showing off, which tracks for a band whose whole ethos has always been about substance over spectacle.
The lyrics move between English and Spanish across the EP's five tracks, and the subject matter ranges wider than the runtime would suggest. There's a direct, unflinching response to the gender policing leveled at athletes like Imane Khelif, a meditation on the layered, contested territory of Latinidad, and a track that pushes back against border violence with the same blunt urgency the band brings to everything else. None of it reads as a checklist of causes. It plays more like a single, sustained argument about who gets to exist without permission — on a stage, on a field, at a border — and who's expected to justify it.
That's really the throughline of Is It Really Living?: not rage for its own sake, but rage aimed at something specific and shared. The record's most quietly striking move is how it frames solidarity — not as an aesthetic or a slogan stitched onto a patch, but as an actual practice, the difference between showing up once and sticking around. "All We Got Is Us" makes that explicit, and by the time it ends, the title's question has answered itself. This is what living looks like when you refuse to shrink.
It would be easy for a band nine years into a project like this to either burn out or go through the motions, trading in the same three riffs and the same three talking points because the crowd already knows the words. Nekra do neither. Is It Really Living? sounds like a band that's gotten sharper with time, not softer — more precise about what it's angry about, and more convinced that anger, used correctly, is still one of the more useful tools available. Eight minutes isn't long. It's more than enough.