ALBUM REVIEW: Every Bridge Burning – Nails
You know a band is special when their name becomes shorthand for a sound that doesn’t quite fit within the confines of a single genre. In NAILS’ case that would be a notoriously vicious concoction of grindcore, hardcore, death metal and powerviolence, the gold standard for which the Californian outfit established across three outstanding full-lengths (plus a few other bits and pieces) that cemented them as one of the best and most influential hardcore bands of the 2010s. And now, finally, there’s a fourth, with founder, guitarist and vocalist Todd Jones joined by a completely new band for the long-awaited Every Bridge Burning.
The line-up may have changed, and it may have taken its sweet time to materialise, but this album is still very much a case of the ‘ain’t broke don’t fix it’ approach that NAILS have stuck to ever since they, uhh, nailed it on their 2010 debut LP Unsilent Death. There are ten tracks, with the longest one at the end, it was recorded with and produced by Kurt Ballou of CONVERGE, and the press notes even explicitly mention that the writing process for this album was no different to that of its predecessors. There can be no mistaking Every Bridge Burning for anything other than a NAILS record, which means, simply and unsurprisingly enough, that it’s bloody great.
Naturally it absolutely tears by, the runtime pulled back inside the 18-minute mark after its 2016 predecessor You Will Never Be One Of Us allowed a one-off foray past 20, and as ever there is much to be said for just how efficiently NAILS use that time – the way they’ll drop a killer groove or two-step part in amongst all the frantic blasting, or put a super fast and furious track right after more of a mid-paced riffy one as is exactly the case in the pairing of recent single Lacking The Ability To Process Empathy and the 38-second Trapped that follows it. Every Bridge Burning may never take its hand off your throat, but it also always seems to know exactly when it needs to adjust its grip to ensure that you never get used to the pressure.
It’s also arguably the ‘catchiest’ record NAILS have ever made, albeit with those inverted commas doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Tracks like Punishment Map, Give Me The Painkiller, Made Up In Your Mind and the aforementioned Lacking The Ability… all have relatively simple barked hooks – often just the titles of the songs themselves – that help them bludgeon their way into your brain that much quicker and stay there that much longer in a way that is often elusive for a band of this ilk – even one as good as NAILS. Though admittedly not completely unprecedented in the band’s discography, this does give Every Bridge Burning something of its own USP, a feature that marks it out from the others and will make it worth coming back to long after the excitement around their return has worn off.
As expected, closer No More Rivers To Cross is slower and doomier than all that precedes it, but it’s also notably shorter than any of the final tracks on any of the band’s previous efforts, as if to highlight the complete absence of fat left to trim here. Every Bridge Burning is absolutely “the delivery of the expectation” Jones promised it would be, a tour de force not only in outright savagery but also in the tight and formidable song and album craft that has been the NAILS guarantee since day one. Inject it into your veins.
Rating: 8/10
Every Bridge Burning is set for release on August 30th via Nuclear Blast Records.
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