Artist: Crucial Response
Title: Puppets
Release: EP / Digital
Year: 2021
Label: Not For The Weak Records
Hailing from Biltar, East Java (Indonesia), Crucial Response play an absolutely hammering, incendiary, thrashing hardcore that feels bruisingly raw but is also tougher than steel.
Originally released on cassette tape by Greedy Dust and Menace Records last February, Puppets is Crucial Response’s third release after Plastic Society EP in 2017 and Mandated Demo in 2019. The tape was met with a rousing reception by the international hardcore punk crowd and finally got the vinyl treatment via Not For The Weak Records in November 2021.
It’s no secret to anyone that the seven-inch is the best format for an old school hardcore punk record, and here you got five tracks clocking in around six minutes while raging in a swirling vortex of rough and ready hardcore in the veins of Negative Approach, Poison Idea, or let’s say Goodbye Cruel World era Out Cold. The stripped down, stomping hardcore of Crucial Response is driven by non-stop riffing speedy guitars, battering drums with a high level of precision and technicality, and an angry South Asian guy delivering the vocals in a confrontational style. What more can you ask for?
Crucial Response aren’t reinventing the wheel here, but that was never their aim. After two previous demos, they have found their sound in Puppets—a heavy-hitting, skull-cracking blast of old school hardcore the way it’s gotta be. Roll on the next record, I can’t wait.
