This Is Endless – Formations of a World Below (Endless Records)

Dripback, Ted Maul, Dead Beyond Buried, Red Method, Onslaught, Meta-Stasis, Voices… with these bands on their collective CV, This Is Endless were never going to deliver an album of wistful love songs.

Indeed, Formations of a World Below – the London crew’s debut full-length – was always going to separate heads from spines…

But even with those expectations firmly in place, this Russ Russell-produced battering ram will make jaws drop to the deck, such is its total, no compromise brutality.

The quintet’s Immolation-style death grooves detonate on a charred landscape of vicious hardcore and pummelling grind, sending out shards of skin shredding, white hot shrapnel like Skin Cyst into whoever’s standing in the way.

It’s savage.

But it’s is anything but one dimensional.

Spearheaded by Red Method/Meta-Stasis/Ted Maul frontman Solomon J Lucifer Christ, This Is Endless bring a nice reminder of the Maul’s noughties bounce to the party too (As I Suffocate a case in point), while the gang vocals on Into The Hive – plus its moshed-up rhythms – show the band are quite happy lurking in the alleyways of dark metallic hardcore.

Pick of the bunch? It’s Back To The Soil. A perfect distillation of this outfit’s volatile ingredients, the track boasts waves of nuclear axework and a confident, HC strut.

However, bar the industrial interlude of Noise Track, Formations of a World Below never really gives us a dull moment. It’s 30 minutes of Brit grit and capital carnage.

As individuals, this line-up have enviable resumes. But the proof is in the pudding. And as a group, they’ve more than delivered on the promise shown on 2016’s Inherit The Skin EP.

This Is Endless? This is fucking lethal.