Nails: Abandon All Life

More than your life is worth – packed into 18 furious minutes

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Admirers of Nails’ particular brand of filth-encrusted nihilism will not be disappointed with this latest release. What they started on their 2009 debut Obscene Humanity and honed on 2010’s Unsilent Death has been trimmed, sharpened and beaten into an even leaner and more punishing listen.

Songs tear along at a horrific pace, panic-inducing vocals scream out from the murk of the songs and the claustrophobic intensity is terrifying. Recorded again at Godcity by the ever-present Kurt Ballou, the band sound positively feral. The outro on the title track sounds almost as if Gojira had been living in the wild for years and had taken to eating hitchhikers.

‘Brutal’ and ‘unrelenting’ are the handy go-to words for albums in the grind/crust genre, but you would be hard-pressed to find a more brutal and unrelenting 18 minutes of fury. It kills, eats and pisses on the remains of all other contenders.