(Andy Synn says that the new album from MEM//BRANE is one hell of a way to kick off 2025)
Let’s keep the momentum of the new year going with a new band… or, at least, a band who are new to me… shall we?
Unafraid to wear their influences or their ideals out and proud – drawing from the same d-beat well which gave birth to the likes of Discharge, Disfear, and Disrupt, while also embracing the biting thrashiness of Ringworm (“Species Invasive”) and the brutish heaviness of Nausea (“The Sheer Veil of Fascism”) – MEM//BRANE pull absolutely no punches on their self-titled debut, either musically or lyrically (example: “None stole my heart / But there’s still been a theft / Asked not to jump / But I’ve already leapt“).
As ugly and as uncompromising as the album is, however (“What You’ve Smeared on the World”, for example is three minutes and forty-nine seconds of charred, gut-churning riffs and snarling, spite-encrusted vocals, while the fantastically-named “Post-Traumatic Mess Disorder” is a savage, sub-two-minute blast of punishing Grind-Punk) there’s clearly a potent method to the band’s particular brand of madness (and, let me tell you, they are mad as hell… and not going to take it any more).
In particular, the occasional use of gloomier, doomier atmospheric passages – especially during the introspective intro of “Cremation” and the moody, melancholy heart of mid-album highlight “In Lieu of Flowers” – feels like a fascinating, yet all too fleeting, glimpse at a side of their sound it would be good for them to explore even further in the future, while the gargantuan grooves and jagged hooks of songs like “(sirens approaching)” and “Rachel Humphreys” (titled, I assume, in tribute to the early trans icon of the same name) ensure that this is one record which remains as virulent as it is venomous from beginning to end.