BLIND GIRLS - Residue LP (Red Vinyl)

Label: Dog Knights

Given that they’re a band that’s been active since 2013, the fact that it’s taken Aussie screamo upstarts Blind Girls five years of making music to materialize a full-length debut – and that this debut, Residue, comes almost two full years after their last release, a split with excellent Japanese band Sans Visage – is a pretty good indication of Residue’s quality.

Residue' is not background music. It's not relaxing. Listening to it is not easy in the traditional sense of letting a song wash over you. These songs do nothing of the sort. If anything, they lull you to a cliff, push you over and into an ocean of gasoline and then set it ablaze. It's 11 tracks in a mere 21 minutes and things get pretty f'n real right off the bat, as the feedback intro of "Breaths" explodes at 9 seconds in a whirlwind screams, frantic strumming and lightspeed drumming, all of which is over by 1:05.

Screamo hasn’t exactly been in a bad place recently, but man, this is easily up there with the genre’s best releases of the year. If you’re a fan of the genre, you really owe it to yourself to check these folks out.