ALBUM REVIEW: What A Time To Be Alive – Werewolves

The past year and some has been pretty unrelenting for many; to cope, some bands opted to release the most chaotic, evil and hateful maelstrom of noise they could. Enter Australia’s WEREWOLVES, whose debut The Dead Are Screaming was very well-received by the underground on release last year. A band who have made it their mission to make, in their own words, something so dumb that you’d grow knuckle hair just listening to it. 

After Australia made a concerted effort to burn to the ground after their debut released, the band then holed up to write a follow up, which was followed by a global pandemic. Perhaps as a direct result of this, the band’s sophomore effort bears the tongue-in-cheek title What A Time To Be Alive and it successfully ups the ante on its predecessor in every conceivable way. 

The simply savage I Don’t Like You opens proceedings with a count to four and a howl of the song title atop devastating riffing. Lyrics are simplistic and animalistic (“I don’t like you / Fucking hate you / Tear your limbs off / beat you to death”) in a way that should be cringey but instead plasters a big, stupid grin across your face. The album doesn’t change tack for the most part; frenetic riffing and over the top lyrics are the order of the day all the way through to closer They Will Pay With Their Own Blood whose opening does change things up, opting for a blackened intro at a mid-paced stomp that’s still heavy enough to flatten mountains. 

What A Time To Be Alive is glorious in its depravity and obnoxious heaviness; the band’s stated achievement of “as the BPM goes up, the IQ goes down” is a daft but not entirely untrue take. It’s a more complex album than they let on, however. The aforementioned blackened intro to the closer, along with the deliriously fast-paced almost melodeath-inspired A Plague On All Your Houses that recalls THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER amongst other moments bring a surprising depth. That’s not to say the album is cerebral; Unfathomably Fucked still features the kind of knuckle-dragging breakdown that gleefully beats listeners over the head and songs occasionally feature misanthropic spoken passages toward the end (Mission Statement and Traitors and Bastards are particularly excellent examples of this) that are deliriously silly fun.

What WEREWOLVES do spectacularly well here is distilling the rage and misanthropy of the last few years into its purest sonic form. There’s double bass drumming, pummelling guitars, savage roars and insults in plentiful supply. It’s fast, vicious music, rage incarnate that hates indiscriminately. Capturing the self-destructive mood of the planet of the last few years and pushing it to its crushing, nihilistic extreme, What A Time To Be Alive is the perfect album companion to the last few awful years, an album that revels in its ignorance and brutality – and you should too. 

Rating: 9/10

What A Time To Be Alive is set for release on January 29th via Prosthetic Records. 

Like WEREWOLVES on Facebook.