MADBALL - NOT YOUR KINGDOM

Track one, Tethered, comes out swinging, verse, chorus, breakdown, all inside the first minute thirty. Anyone worried they wouldn't be able to two-step to the latest Madball, relax, you're covered. Tethered settles into a groove for its final third, then track two, Flammable, blows the whole thing up with a blast beat, just to keep you honest. And Flammable clocks in at exactly one minute, halftime breakdown and all. You want to tell me Madball are slipping after that?

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Here's the “but” though, and it's the real crux of the record. This is also, unmistakably, a rock-adjacent album at moments. Madball built a career on hardcore's blue-collar, unglamorous economy. On Not Your Kingdom, they explore past that discipline. Some tracks get bigger choruses, more melodic lead lines, structures that get to breathe instead of just grinding toward the breakdown. It’s still hardcore in its bones, still pissed off, but it’s dressed differently at times without ever changing what's underneath. 

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And look, the economy hasn't gone anywhere. Nothing outstays its welcome, thirty seconds is plenty for something as short, fast and loud as IWI. Strip out the interludes and the proper songs still average close to three minutes each, disciplined despite all the room they've given themselves. The real moments of experimentation, if you can even call it that, live somewhere else entirely.

Rebelude, an interlude after the first two hard-hitting tracks, is pedal steel guitar and organ. It gets forty-eight seconds and not a second more. Sunrise, track eight, is something else again, the sound of actual life in NYHC. Traffic. Scrolling the radio in the car and landing on Mobb Deep. Snatches of the album being worked out on an acoustic guitar somewhere in the background. It's a window into the kingdom, not a detour. The record can afford the melody and the space because the band explores foreign ideas without touching the hardcore fundamentals.

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Then there's Rebel Kids, the lead single. Honestly, it's not the strongest track here. Cricien's delivery is doing the heavy lifting, while the band leans closer to hard rock than hardcore. If the metallic-hardcore track Stab Wounds had led instead, the story writes itself: Madball never left, no notes, case closed. That they picked Rebel Kids, a song that says something about the scene over the one that just sounds like the scene tells you exactly what mattered to them this time round. Rebel Kids is a manifesto over muscle, and there's an honesty in that choice too, a band admitting they still want to be heard, even while every other track insists the throne was never up for debate.

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The Ride carries the other side of that same admission. "I fell in love with that city, it almost ate me alive" isn't a victory lap, it's a survivor's account, love and near-death sitting in the same breath. A king who tells you the kingdom nearly cost him everything is telling you the crown was fought for, not handed down.

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That's what this is, in the end. Madball aren't reclaiming the kingdom. They helped build it, and they never left it. Long live the king.

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SCORE 8/10

Reviewed by Ryan Lind