Abandon All Life…NAILS
Album Review + More

It’s been nearly three years since Nails released their first record Unsilent Death and ringed us all by the neck and kicked us in the mouth while we were down on the ground. Time flies when you’re having fun, eh?

But the truth is Nails aren’t fun. Unsilent Death wasn’t fun and neither is its follow-up Abandon All Life. Nails are aggression and red-eyed fury incarnate. This was proven with the 15 minutes of ruinous hardcore that was Unsilent Death. Its vitriol and fury seeming unparalleled but how were they going to match it? Could they match it? The answer is an emphatic yes and a fist in the face for thinking otherwise.

With a little more of a metallic edge in its step, Abandon All Life makes its MO perfectly clear at the get-go with ‘In Exodus’, a roaring thrashing number with piercing guitars and earth shaking double kick drums that’ll tear houses down. Meanwhile, ‘God’s Cold Hands’ is a ruthless beast soaked in misanthropy and is evidence of the band stepping up their game greatly amongst peers like Trap Them.

Of course, Nails are primarily concerned with speed and ferocity. That’s a given. However, they’ve shown a few times in the past the ability to slow the beating down for a moment and ‘Wide Open Wound’, an appropriate song title if there ever was one, is more than proof of that.

Abandon All Life follows a similar format to Unsilent Death with short one minute long bursts of bile accompanied by a longer middle way track and lengthier number to close. It’s predictable in a sense, but it works. Nails are band from whom you know exactly what you’re getting. Perhaps Unsilent Death benefitted from something of an element of surprise. With Abandon All Life, their profile had been expanded and so had expectation. It’s still a pummelling, and while expected it’s totally crushing and debilitating sonic violence.