Formed in February 2020, New Orleans-based grindcore/death metallers BRAT have very quickly established themselves as one of the best new extreme metal acts to take the US’ underground by storm post-pandemic. With the release of their first two EPs, 2021’s Mean Is What We Aim For and 2022’s Grime Boss, the band’s trademark blend of chunky death metal, rabid grindcore and a generous dose of hardcore gave them a distinct and catchy sound that translated well to their live shows, setting the Louisianan quartet up as a band to watch. Now, with the release of their debut album, Social Grace, BRAT are further cementing their place as one of the most promising acts within grindcore and death metal, with this album broadening and strengthening their already impressive sound and introducing their excellent musical brew to a much wider audience.
The album begins with two caustically short, sharp shocks in the form of Ego Death and Hesitation Wound, two songs that bring together blistering tempos, monstrous grooves and coarse vocals. They’re a pair of brief but utterly brutal slabs of death metal informed by a generous dose of hardcore, making for an incredibly energetic and punchy start to the record. Slow Heat adopts a sludgy, slower sound, although it still feels like an absolute juggernaut due to the chunky guitar work, thunderous drumming and throaty, belligerent vocal deliveries, turning this into a lengthier take on the preceding tracks.
Truncheon sheds the over-riding death metal in favour of a faster, chaotic grindcore sound with some punishing flourishes towards the song’s closing moments, shifting the pace and tone of the music significantly. Human Offense, if anything, manages to strike a fine balance between the meaty sound of the first three tracks and the unhinged grindcore of the previous one, ebbing and flowing between mid-paced, rumbling guitars and domineering vocals, with several discordant and frenetic moments peppered throughout for good measure.
Rope Drag, with its palm-muted swagger and tar thick basslines, reverts to a catchier sound, with the sinister bark of the vocals standing in stark contrast with the music, making an impression despite how fleeting it is. Blood Diamond develops this style further, with the focused gallop of the drums and guitars providing an excellent backdrop to the visceral, duelling vocals and cacophonous middle section, and serving as yet another stand out performance on an already fantastic record. Snifter leans prominently into the band’s underlying hardcore influences, with only the bellicose gutturals and some speed-driven sections linking it in any way to the death metal of the album’s first half, with only the unflinchingly aggressive final moments seeing those harsher elements return.
After the one to two-minute bursts that have made up much of this album’s substance, the nearly three-minute long Sugar Bastard feels like a sprawling epic in comparison, but the longer runtime of this and the album’s closing track allows for BRAT to inject a lot of interesting ideas into these climactic efforts, with the first featuring a lighter, more angular guitar sound and dizzying tempo shifts that lend it an air of unpredictability, with the music likewise altering abruptly, bringing together the full range of the band’s influences into one place and making this one of the album’s most adventurous offerings. Social Grace has a denser, death metal sound with a touch of powerviolence added into the mix and makes for a great climax, with every aspect being extremely impressive and making for an engrossing feel, concluding things in a huge and ferocious manner.
Listening to Social Grace, and then comparing it with the band’s preceding EPs, it’s very clear just how much BRAT have developed in the last two years, with their sound possessing a greater depth that ties together the hardcore, death metal and grindcore elements within their sound a lot more effectively than it did on Mean Is What We Aim For and Grime Boss, although that core, muscular sound is still very much part of this record’s musical backbone. This is a great debut that showcases just how far BRAT have progressed with their songwriting in just over four years, and lays some incredibly solid foundations for their music going forward that, considering how much they have developed in such a short space of time, they will build upon and outstrip in the not too distant future.
Rating: 8/10
Social Grace is out now via Prosthetic Records.
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