If you really commit and do your homework, sticking with tradition can always feel fresh and vital. This group from Barcelona certainly perfects a sound that could have come straight from the height of ’80s hardcore, when punks and metalheads started to blur together. This pummels, crackling with lightning and feedback that never once missteps. Brutality without a care for the modern world.
Barcelona has been a growing staple for European punk and IRREAL is the perfect example of the Spanish strength, featuring members of BARCELONA, UNA BESTIA INCONTROLABLE, and NUEVA FUERZA just to name a few. These calloused musicians quickly continue where DESTINO FINAL (whose members were in) left off but angrier and faster. Five tracks of defiant hardcore that owes as much to Finnish hardcore as it does to DISCHARGE, and by no means do they forget their Spanish punk classics. You get the feeling that the more bands write in their own language the angrier it feels, and this is the perfect example of the anti-establishment sentiment. Without a doubt one of the best EPs that saw the light of day during the COVID-era “new normalcy.” Muerte al sistema!
With a start that makes even the most casual listener take note and wonder if they are about to be washed away by a tsunami of ’82 Italian hardcore, IRREAL set their scene before they even make it through one riff…and then they get better. Relentless, pounding drums that dance (like, literally you will want to dance), as the band crashes into and through an array of Southern European punk influences and art-damaged DISCHARGE reinterpretations. So tormented are these guitars, it’s as if the person playing them is attacking with frustration, trying simply to make them sound like they are supposed to—and when you deliver breakneck D-beat (“Ruines”) with that kind of fury, the results are terrifying. IRREAL is the product of several stalwarts of the Barcelona scene, so it comes as no surprise that Fi Del Mon is good—and still when “Maisons” closes the show, there’s nothing I want to do except start from the beginning. Highest recommendation.
