The Omnipresence of Audio
And so, “Listening Habits Volume #7” – the new frontier. Well, not really or in fact at all. Welcome to a new series emanating from the reanimated Ear Nutrition. A collection of words pertaining to the human ability to create art by banging, picking and plucking various objects in sequence to form a coherent whole.
The modus operandi of this series is to celebrate the very nature of these sounds. From the legacy of the old onward to the fluidic, undulating nature of the contemporary and finally, to the frequent flashes of the emergent, all in reverence to the functional and irrevocable symbiosis of the three.
Succinctly put. The new, the old and the somewhere-in-between, communicated in written form whenever I can be bothered, as experienced by my very own lug’oles in effort to counter the mundanity-derived cognitive atrophy I’ve experienced since bining this off!
Kill The President – ‘The Lighthouse’ (Single)
May 2026
Melodic Hardcore / Skate Punk
It’s time to face the tide, or at least within the chronology of Valencian exports, Kill The President!, it will be soon enough, come the forthcoming 2026 edition of October on its second day. If in doubt, then fittingly, akin to this anthem of self-assurance and cranial defiance antithetical to the existentially crushing environs surrounding us all, look to ‘The Lighthouse’.
Whether there is any credence to the speculation that this latest precision-blast was born on, or is somehow related to the mountainous clear water of Slovenia, is for those who make it their business to examine nautical-apocrypha and isn’t for now. Crusing digression aside, ‘The Lighthouse’ is the first of the incoming audio-cartography set to map, assist and resist the oncoming tide and does so with a clarity of mind, depicting struggle and doubt but also the realisation of what is needed to overcome them.
Sonically, following on from 2022’s Aftermath and its quasi-recomposition of a technical Skate Punk core, from then so enriched and with Hardcore centricity and then onward to ‘Unspoken’ (2024) hammering this writhing hybrid home, ‘The Lighthouse’ in 2026 pivots again. Reviving, substantiating, and markedly rejuvenating the timeless nature of their 2015 debut, there is nothing but codification of the band’s new era. Adrenalised, exacting and coalescent in its fierce yet tunefully positive instrumentation, the lyrical transition from fraught stability to posturing strength and determinism is intrinsically felt to the highest order across ‘The Lighthouse’.
Hike The Peak – Elements
May 2026
Melodic Hardcore / Skate Punk / Fast Pop-Punk
Whether this is technically the third or second album by Hike The Peak is a question I am unequipped to answer, but what I can do is chart a foray into the swathe Elements cuts, with all the force of its moniker and the primordially derived names of its staggered and expressive modus operandi prior to full release. Now combined into its constitutional hole, the progress of the band/project/entity is at its greatest clarity and can be appreciated for the step-forward it is within itself, but also via its radiant adoration of the malady-disembolwer that is the amorphous melodic Punk-Rock scene.
Expedtiously championing positivity, deconstructing sardonically amusing in-scene fallacy and campaigning for greater unity, understanding and critical thinking, Elements eclectic lyrical display substantiates its model with ease. Sonically pairing such contents with a more expressive and cleaner production, the comparatively more elasticated showcase of the project’s up-tempo modality exerts full control over its own and indeed your surroundings ahead of any relative cognition on your part.
The band’s core of hybridised Skate Punk and Melodic Hardcore embodies more of the technical characteristics it is known for, with harder, more metallic riffs gaining more airtime at both the fore and the relentless underbelly. Elsewhere, a more noticeable drive into both adrenalised Pop-Skate Punk and, in places, the jagged, angular and metallic breakdowns more akin to Easycore-esque Pop-Punk, complement and contrast said compositional heaviness elsewhere as much as it does the soaring melodies strewn across the album’s whole.
Release-number-whatever is comfortable, confident and committed. But fast.
On this album, Hike The Peak commandeered the voiceboxes of: Colorsfade, Fake News, Darko, Blagged, One Fall, Deadheat, Judo CHOP!, Gametime, Antillectual and Still Gonna Bail.
Those are tags for the purpose of linking together content for more nutritional navigation here, not links. I’m not going to do ALL the work for you; you’re already on the internet…
Hike The Peak – The Great Unknown (EP)
June 2026
Melodic Hardcore / Skate Punk
No, this isn’t an error. I had planned – fucking ages ago – prior to an absolute flop in motivation, to cover the above Elements, but as the lapse of time is a cruel arbiter of, well, itself (what even is a fourth wall at this stage?), it didn’t happen and after deciding then it would indeed come to pass, HTP’s invariable upward climb yielded another bounty to those a touch down the slope, unable to match its pace but earnestly following its melodious trail. An extremely long sentence aside, The Great Unknown appeared, setting a new pace and promulgating the aforementioned MO of the Hike The Peak collective by brimming over the edge of its past, all the while simultaneously imbuing and fuelling itself with it in a perpetual cycle of its own dynamism.
The purveyance of Elements is denoted above and holds its own with ease, soaring with gleaming melody and unafraid of either owning or adapting the ubiquity of slick Pop-Punk inclination and intonation across the ever-more-so multi-faceted Skate Punk spectrum. The Great Unknown, however, though very much emanating from the same HTP tradition, shifts course. Soundtracking its PMA and existential ponderence adjacent to the above and yet crucially doing so with it still in mind, this release dances closer to the harder and comparatively more gritty technical Skate Punk and Melodic Hardcore, similarly strewn across such a devoted compendium, which, as a result, renders you hopelessly and utterly in want of more. But fast(er).
On this EP, HTP has requisitioned members of: Disaster Forecast/Blagged, Splitcast and No Guidance.
Ah, the internet. What a wonderful tool…
Such Gold – Misadventures
August 2012
Melodic Hardcore / Pop-Punk / Post-Hardcore
Having somewhat spoken on both Pop-Punk and precision further up, we arrive fittingly at Misadventures.
Recently, I had a bit of a deep-diving, mathematically engineered jolly through Such Gold’s back catalogue. Though really, the only mathematical prowess involved is how intricately technical and jauntingly tantalising this album is to listen to, still, just as it was when it promptly blew me away the first time. Though sitting on a reputable amalgam of Melodic Hardcore and Pop-Punk at this stage of their career and for the most part avoiding the sufficiently (somewhat but not always) demulsified Easycore stylistics of the era, Such Gold hit me square across the face with Misadventures. A release, now as much as then, that I would confidently champion as being simultaneously ahead of its time and a crucial in-career pivot and precursor to the progressive Math-Rock and Post-Hardcore-Pop-Punk compound the band would go on to exude so effortlessly later on.
As much as I implore you to go forth and discover everything post-Misadventures, I can’t emphasise enough how this 2012 full-length warrants your attention. Heavy, warped, often bluegeoning and yet playfully weightless in its precision melodic delivery, the band continuously reconstitute themselves in front of your very ears without losing their take on the accolades so attributed to the growing-pain-derived youthful exuberance the genre has become such a survivalist proponent of. Though, really, do those pains ever cease?
Existential questions aside, I have little more to say on this masterful, meticulous and elating listening experience, bar once again ardently stating how unequivocally worth your time it and indeed, Such Gold’s abrasive charm really are.
NØ MAN – Glitter and Spit
March 2024
Hardcore Punk / Post-Hardcore
You know what they say – ‘Third time (adds to and continues to perfect) – ‘s the charm’. Whether or not such a maxim, proverbial idiomatic phrasology or its sequentially meta deconstruction carries anything of actual value or meaning now at this stage of this sentence is utterly irrelevant. What is, however, extremely relevant, important and pressing as of this questionable prose, is how much of a continued stride, one extended so indomitably, NØ MAN made with 2024’s Glitter and Spit.
The band’s previous records speak for themselves (this one even more so, but we will get to that), and they have since begun to move on toward their next release with the lumbering leviathan that is ‘Moan’. Back to the release at hand, Glitter and Spit is an album of such innate power that a sense of awe and an utterly reconstituted sense of self is the byproduct of its content when experiencing it as a cohesive, sequential work. As I type this with the album playing at my desk, for the second time today after it spun upon my record player this morning, I feel the same level of evocation, dread, danger, lament and innate vitriol faultlessly replicated and equated as I listen in a state of powerless absorption.
Musically, NØ MAN have consistently spun Hardcore their way, with each album contorting it vehemently to need. On Glitter and Spit, be it pummelling, angular, and blasting riffs or rhythmic strings marching to a ceaseless directive, dragging the album’s huge bulk without breaking a sweat, a crevasse is formed in its desolate wake. Dramatic description aside, album three boasts such a command that it could pivot, sonically, in any direction and yet still be untouchable. Imbued more so with an unabated ferocity of metallic serration and brimming with unpredictable Post-Hardcore energy, topping off riffs with caustic melodious leads, Glitter and Spit is definitively potent.
Lyrically, well, I would say that you just need to go and listen to it, in all honesty, where the following will then go without saying – Glitter and Spit is irrefutable proof that widening our ears to the experience of others is vital to our continued development and battle against cages of mind and metal.
Free Palestine.
Death By Stereo – Just Like You’d Leave Us, We’ve Left You For Dead (EP)
October 2016
Hardcore Punk / Metallic Hardcore / Metal
Another band defining vehemence beyond the capacity of the language used to quantify and describe such an obliterative potency, Death By Stereo are an essential font of explosivity when it comes to the historical confluence of Punk-Rock, Hardcore and Metal. So much so, that after the release of the first single in six years, the combative ‘Flawed Theology’ and after the *insert superlative here* We’re All Dying Just In Time I found myself ruminating where exactly I would send newcomers to embrace the “Death for life” mantra for the first time as a non-pernicious microdose.
A pressing question, considering DBS have been around since 1998, but one that I would argue can be consolidated in the indomitable command Just Like You’d Leave Us, We’ve Left You For Dead has over its listening experience and any habitual return to it. Though (to my knowledge) lesser mentioned in discussions on the bands’ collectively seminal output, the six-track bombard encapsulates the fluid, varied nature of the DBS-cannonade. Whether it’s the classicist-inspired Hardcore Punk, outright Metal or the ballard-esque enormity wrapped around and fed by such an imposing stature, you’re nothing but a thrall on this release.
Just Like You’d Leave Us, We’ve Left You For Dead captures a band consistently at their best in a perfectly zeroed-in dosage with all the combustive clout, incendiary impact and impassioned melody of their entire career, decidedly adversarial and living for a better world – Death for life!!
‘So much power, so much power!’
Here then, volume #7 of Listening Habits passes, another reflection on some releases contributing to the incremental loss of my ability to hear things.
Some from the “list”, some from recent rotation and some just because I was reminded of them just enough to piss off the neighbours a further touch more via the additional amplification of their brilliance.
What a time it is to be my neighbours.
