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Iron Pike – II

Iron Pike – II
Unsigned – 2017 

Labels, if you're out there – Iron Pike is cheap gold. Seriously, sign these men and send them on tour, it's cold in Sweden. Hardcore/Sludge act straight out of Malmö, Iron Pike takes influences from both scenes, then paints on a grimey veneer and puts it in the freezer overnight. Ethereal, hope-filled chords clash with heavy riffs, the latter taking the best of the hardcore and sludge worlds, while the drums put you in a ritualistic trance, not dissimilar to that of nodding opium-den lowlifes.

An opium den would be a good descriptor for the studio this was recorded in – muffled by the thick gray smoke, II sounds like what happens when the police finally show up, and bodies scramble upon bodies to escape, blinded and uncoordinated. There's something so inevitable about their riffs, as if they warned of unavoidable pain and death, and all you could do is watch the events unfold.

While some chords give breathing space, the basslines under finally breaking from the root note formula, you quickly fall back into the abyssal rage of Iron Pike, their singer spilling his guts in some of my favourite raw sludge vocals of this year. The hardcore influences are most apparent in the riffs and the singing, with raspy barks and angry screams aggressively punctuating songs – but only with exclamation marks.


There's something gritty, nasty and dirty between sludge and hardcore. Heavy but still angry and aggressive – rabid, actually. If there were ever two genres which need to be mixed more, it'd be these two.





Giuseppe Fitzsimmons
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