NASTY INSECTS - Bite Til They Bleed

Throughout the punchy 27 minutes is a push-pull between anger at the system and the sinking allure of giving up. Tracks like I’m Sick are explosive right out the gate, repetition driving home the visceral vitriol of inhabiting an unwell mind in an unwell system that is unwavering despite the changing external seasons, vocals distorted in a way reminiscent of sci fi animations from the 2010s, all smooth pitch bends and laser sounds. Depressed continues in the same vein, driven with moving bass and cowbell with the despondent refrain of “I’m fucked, wrecked, obsessed with death” sitting atop as a counterpoint. Harmonically, there are several points where the key is modulated in a cyclical, never-resolving fashion, reflecting the ways in which trauma and the grind of modern life never ends, always seeming like there’s a way out, a way forward, an ascent to the end, only to be dragged back under to square one.

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Dead Soul reprises the almost satirical edge that show Nasty Insects almost making fun of their own despondency. Wails of “sunSHINEEE” make a mockery of forced positivity and idealism. Who gives a fuck about the blue sky when you’re dead inside? It’s punctuated by the deadpan sentiment of Just Admit It, a brutally honest two minutes that’s straight up about the state of the world. Between AI and endless war, “being positive should be a crime”. Screamed over the rocking, headbanging foundations that scaffold this album, there’s a sense of galvanisation under the cynicism. In a way, making the depressing art is a way through the depression.

It’s not all broad political critique and despair, though. Trauma Dreams is a personal deep cut, documenting the sickening distortion of a PTSD nightmare. Whining guitar feedback launches into dense, blocky chords and hazing synth drone, and the vocal delivery is much more thrash-metal-coded than previous tracks, almost reptilian in tongues. The slowly revealed resentment towards the abuser is real and furious - “That fucking pig fucked up my brain” - which gives devastating way to the final section where the realisation of the memories for what they are, reality over fiction, truth over the yearned-for untruths, clears up the confusion, and the regularity of the rhythm moves on. Life continues. The trauma dreams will return.

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Overall, Bite Til They Bleed is an album of exposed bone. The truth is harrowing to face, but facing it head on with a rousing groove and a sense of collective suffering makes it slightly more bearable. If we must endure what comes from within and pushes down from above, screaming about it is the cathartic release needed to live another day.

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SCORE 7.5

Reviewed by Charlie Fern