ALBUM REVIEW: What Makes You Tick? – Going Off
Manchester’s GOING OFF might not be doing much to mess with hardcore’s tried and tested essentials, and yet their no-frills attitude has helped them build up a solid degree of momentum in their short time as a band. Formed towards the end of 2019, and with just a couple of EPs to their name, the five-piece have been getting attention in all the right places. They’re signed to quite possibly the best label in the UK in Church Road Records, they’re down to play 2000Trees in July – the winds are very much in the Mancunians’ favour, and now is the perfect time to capitalise with their debut full-length What Makes You Tick?.
Crammed into a tight 21 minutes, this album is an interesting one in that it offers a harsh and abrasive take on hardcore, while also being easy enough to get to grips with quite quickly. It’s got that grooving, swaggering style of bands like MADBALL and TERROR, for example, but with an added nastiness driven especially by the rasped barks of vocalist Jake Huxley that moves GOING OFF more towards the likes of GULCH or CANDY if you’re looking for a good playlist to stick them in. Rarely does the tempo launch into the outright frenetic, with the band preferring instead to sit at a pace that feels geared most of all towards the steady banging of heads or the rhythmic lifting of weights at the gym.
With this, of course, comes some very much expected thematic fury. On the surface, lead single Premium Dream tells the story of a dystopian future in which the ultra-wealthy pay to experience ‘premium dreams’ to escape the nightmare of everyday life, but one doesn’t have to push too hard at the metaphor to find an indictment of the inequality that plagues our world today. “You pay a little bit more” seethes Huxley in the track’s sparse and menacing close, the bleakness of the soundscape suggesting that perhaps the dystopia is here already. There are also no prizes for guessing who the band are aiming at on the raging highlight of eighth track Black White Blue, especially not once it opens with Clarence Boddicker’s “Cops don’t like me, so I don’t like cops” quote from the original RoboCop.
It’s not all hatred though. Opener More Love kicks the record off with a motivational call to self-love and self-acceptance (“To hell with self-hatred / Fuck what they say”), and it’s immediately followed by Code Of Conduct’s assertions of “We all deserve the same respect / Equality’s the very least that we expect” as the band look toward a safer and more tolerant future. Placed early in the record as they are, lines like these lay out GOING OFF’s defiant and inclusive ethos, and they make it abundantly clear that if you are not with them you can only be against them.
If there are any issues here the first is that Huxley’s aforementioned vocals may be a sticking point for some. His bark does suit the assignment well, and it definitely gives GOING OFF a little more of their own identity, but it really is a nasty one and it will probably move the band away from being anyone’s entry point into hardcore at the very least. The other criticism worth giving a bit of airtime to is the fact that there are a few points where What Makes You Tick? might fall a little into the generic. Some of the riffs on tracks like Self-Hatred and Ugly Heart really do feel like you might’ve heard them before, which again is hardly the rarest issue in the genre but might frustrate those looking for more boundaries to be pushed.
Both of those criticisms should be taken lightly however, as they are essentially judging What Makes You Tick? for what it isn’t rather than for what it is. Because at the end of the day this is a pissed-off, beef-heavy hardcore record that may sound like plenty of others but is still delivered with enough force and fury to satisfy anyone who enjoys the genre in its purest and most primal form.
Rating: 7/10
What Makes You Tick? is set for release on February 24th via Church Road Records.
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