Fresh new hardcore from Czechia. It’s heavy, yet agile, and the songs have a lot of nuance and tempo changes. It swings between broody plodding and hype thrashing, and there are alternating vocals—a meaty main voice and intermittent possessed shrieks. Punctuated by soundbites à la the 1990s, these nine tracks are creatively composed and go down smooth.
VOLE has been around for a while now, constantly writing and putting out music, touring and booking shows for other bands, forming their sound and scene. A classic hard-working group who seem to enjoy all their invested efforts. They keep Prague on the map, and themselves on the road. Their new record is wild and strange, while deeply rooted in hardcore/punk: it’s aggressive, vicious, and has primitive, pumping hardcore in the middle of it all. But it also includes various different sounds and approaches that are less typical, although worked into a coherent unit, avoiding a messy hodgepodge. The record sounds big, groovy, and unshakably massive, and this largeness bears the newly introduced melodies and rather rock-ish riffs that are gloomier than before. Wrapped into intensity, nothing sounds unusually out of place—the flow of the record takes me away, and I have to rationally shake and distance myself to think about whether I like certain parts, in general and out of context. The answer would be, in many cases, “no,” yet VOLE was clever enough to craft such a forward-thinking record with multiple layers that still sounds, above all, like a banging punk record. Because it’s anchored well to the attributes of hardcore, the solid base lets them explore and incorporate without sacrificing the core sound. So it’s a fun, genre-bending record that balances well between tradition and innovation. It kicks you in the face and then sings to you: “la la la.”
