2022 celebrates ten years of both METZ as a band and of their critically acclaimed S/T album.  The music made by METZ, Alex Edkins (guitar & vocals), Hayden Menzies (drums) & Chris Slorach (bass) has always been difficult to pin down. Their earliest recordings contained nods to the teeming energy of early ‘90s DIY hardcore, the aggravated angularities of This Heat, & the noisy riffing of AmRep’s quintessential guitar manglers, but there was never a moment where METZ sounded like they were paying tribute to the heroes of their youth. The sonic trajectory of their albums captures the journey of a band shedding influences & digging deeper into their fundamental core—steady propulsive drums, chest-thumping bass lines, bloody-fingered guitar riffs, the howling angst of fading innocence. 

Kowloon Walled City In the world of heavy music, few bands embrace dynamics and negative space like Oakland's Kowloon Walled City. Since forming 15 years ago, the band has increasingly refined its deconstructed approach to noise rock, math rock, and doom. With Piecework (Neurot Recordings/Gilead Media), the band’s fourth album and first in six years, Kowloon Walled City reaches new levels of restraint. Songs are bleak and slow, but shorter and more concise. There are stretches of near silence. And with the gristle stripped away, bone and muscle remain: drums decaying in a room, bass strings rattling, a lonely guitar chord. Through the resignation and regret, Piecework also hints at perseverance and hope. On “Utopian,” inspired in part by Kim Stanley Robinson’s book Red Mars, Evans declares, “now we’re weightless, left for dead / there’s no sorry songs left”—a statement of fatalism or perhaps a rallying cry, as if to say, we get it, things are fucked—now what?