Nasti

Reviews

Nasti People Problem LP

This is a real bad vibes only record, building on the excellent Life is Nasti LP and doubling down on misery. While a lot of hardcore wants to keep jacking up the tempo, I have a soft spot for mid-paced punk like this that invites you to crawl on the floor alongside it. There’s something about keeping things at slower BPM that gives you the impression a band doesn’t feel the need to impress you with anything other than its reverb-drenched riffs and vocals that snarl through a permanent frown. This is a direct descendent, though more dialed-in and exact, of NO TREND’s noisy brand of DGAF hardcore, and that’s a lineage always worth paying attention to. With songs like the aptly-named “Snarling,” the band pulls you into its muck effectively and doesn’t let you go. The stylistic outlier, closer “White Fences II,” even goes full industrial for an outro that eventually excises everything but feedback from the band’s sound leaving you awash in something formless and nihilistic. A fitting end to a toothsome blast of bent hardcore.

Nasti Life is Nasti LP

Another hardcore banger coming from two labels that always deliver the best in punk. Washington’s NASTI is able to play hardcore without overusing the genre’s tropes. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s stompy, sometimes it’s weird as hell, but it all flows perfectly through each song just at the right time. Life is Nasti has eight powerful tracks of rage-filled moshpit bangers, a LP that could be on the shelf right next to contemporary hardcore like GAG or HOAX but certainly pays homage to VOID, UNITED MUTATION, and NO TREND alike. Their territory is somewhere in between the chaos and the weirdness, a bleak vision of modern life. Life is fucking NASTI!