EP REVIEW: Green Terrorism – Anti Ritual

There is something ridiculous in the water in Copenhagen this year. Of course, the Danish capital has always delivered really, but specifically with releases from the likes of EYES and TELOS in recent months it’s fast becoming synonymous with some of the most brilliantly abrasive hardcore you’ll hear in 2023. Sharing a label with the former, and having already made an impressive statement with their 2021 debut full-length Expel The Leeches, grindy blackened hardcore outfit ANTI RITUAL are out to strengthen the case for Copenhagen supremacy even further with their new EP Green Terrorism.

Centred on the relentless destruction of our planet under global capitalism, and with an emphasis on showing no tolerance to those responsible, Green Terrorism certainly captures the urgency of the themes at hand. Most of us will be well aware that there is no time to waste when it comes to saving our dying world, and this seems to be reflected in the furious pace and runtime of the EP. With six tracks spanning just seven and a half minutes – written with the expressed intention of fitting on a 7” vinyl – Green Terrorism just rips by, the kind of record you can listen to about eight times in an hour just to make sure you’ve really got to grips with it.

Performance wise, instant credit must be awarded to drummer Nikolaj Borg, responsible as he is for the EP’s relentless, breathless pace. Majoring heavily on lightspeed blasts and D-beats, he forms a sturdy backbone around which the rest of the band arrange all manner of rapid tremolo picking, thick riffs and vicious barks from vocalist Marco Malcorps. There won’t be much of it that comes as a huge surprise to anyone fond of bands like THE SECRET or TRAP THEM for example, but the execution is never lacking, and the brevity of proceedings only serves to make them all the more enthralling.

If there’s a specific highlight it’s penultimate track The Ghost Of Mary Shelley, arguably standing out most of all thanks to its slower and sludgier riffs which insist on more of a straight headbanging than the more windmill-inducing fare of much of the rest of the record. “There is no way to escape the magnitude of what we’ve done” bellows Malcorps in one of the hardest hitting lyrics of the EP, with another contender found in the title track which asserts, “You deserve to be eradicated before you kill everything else / It’s you or the rest of us”.

So with no mercy to be found anywhere, and a thick and powerful mix from bassist K. B. Larsen, Green Terrorism makes for a wonderfully violent little bludgeoning that will leave you wanting to deal out much the same on anyone who continues to insist on pushing this planet past the point of no return. As the band emphasise also in The Ghost Of Mary Shelley, “this black hole will swallow us all” if we don’t do anything. Maybe you only came here for the riffs and the screaming and the shouting, but hopefully it will be ANTI RITUAL’s message that you really take away from this; it’s not quite too late, but the time to act is right now.

Rating: 8/10

Green Terrorism is set for release on May 5th via Indisciplinarian.

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