Endless Nothing is good for one thing and one thing only: Caving in your damned skull, crushing all of your vertebrae, spilling your guts, and setting them on fire. Or maybe that’s four things.

Thirteen songs, most of them short, all of them tremendously heavy and brutally destructive — that’s what the new second album by North Carolina’s Torch Runner delivers. The riffs alternately hammer like giant mallet blows or roar like smoking concrete saws, and at all times they vibrate with radioactive levels of distortion. The percussion follows the same kind of tag-team format — pounding with enough force to split asphalt or blasting away like heavy artillery.

And my god, the bass — the bass is absolutely staggering. You don’t believe me, just check out the opening minute of the album’s longest song, the catastrophically bleak “Circle of Shit”. Continue reading »