Böndbreakr – EXILE – out now on Grimace Records
“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
― Audre Lorde
About a year ago, Hurricane G, Böndbreakr’s vocalist, was telling me about the time when she started to get interested in rock music and the imagination of fronting her own band or shredding a Flying V began to fill her thoughts. She put a lid on it for years, telling herself she couldn’t possibly be in a rock band.
But she continued to imagine.
Imagine what you can do when imagination is allowed to flourish.
But the system doesn’t like imagination to be free. It likes to police imagination.
It likes to control the narratives. Its own narratives.
Narratives of racial injustice. Narratives of climate injustice. Narratives of health injustice. Narratives of housing injustice. Narratives of body injustice. Narratives of education injustice.
The products of capitalism.
Following stints in a couple of punk bands, G fully lifted the lid, created her Hurricane and roared Böndbreakr into life.
Earlier this year, Böndbreakr signed to acclaimed underground activist punk label, Grimace Records, home of MDC and Naked Aggression. On 25th August 2023, they released their second EP Exile, an explosive, bonecrunching assault where the tributaries of hardcore, punk, skate, grindcore, psychedelia, thrash and burning social observation meet to forge a unity of resistance, revolution and love with the voiceless against Poe’s nightmarish descent into the maelstrom. Maybe consciousness and redemption will emerge from the terror.
Galveston and Mainland top and tail the album – love songs to G’s hometown – stripped back guitar and percussion breezing over the souls of ancestors, the distorted mourning of a planet earth slipping away. The single, Progress and Change, berates climate injustice, attacks on body autonomy and cronyism. Take a breath at the chorus and bridge, but make it quick ‘cos Böndbreakr aren’t finished….the closing couple of minutes rolls up our sleeves, grabs our indifferent hands and plunges them in the sea of reckoning – there’s been “enough waiting for a better day”.
Know Thy Enemy features the awesome Bobbie Kleman (vocalist from fellow Austin-based band Hellfury) guesting alongside G to pummel you for 1:30 of pure and furious hardcore. Scuzzfuggit slipstreams into a 1 minute blast of riffshifting, shapeshifting, sleek skatecore. Iconoclast is another dissident shapeshifter, smouldering, burning, spitting hellfire resistance to the oppressors. Tine Bheo au Phobail (Living Fire of the People) grinds and twists its distorted barrage of riffs and screams at you to confront the reality of our world.
More of this, please.
Review By: Giles Sibbald
Photos by: Adrian Benavides
