JUSTICE FOR THE DAMNED – STAY RELENTLESS

(Andy Synn gets in the ring once more, ready for another beating from Justice For The Damned)

Did you know that Amazon was originally called “Relentless”?

It’s true, and while I’m glad they didn’t stay relentless – as that would have really confused things SEO-wise for this review – that little factoid does provide a bit of extra insight into the organisation’s unapologetically brutal business practices that they’ve used to beat down their competitors and crush all opposition.

And speaking of beat downs…

Over the course of 12 rounds… ok, we’ll call them “songs”… the new album from Aussie Hardcore heavyweights Justice for the Damned (the long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s Pain Is Power, which I loved enough to give a place on my Personal Top Ten) continues to make a case for why they deserve a shot at the title, delivering a series of humongously heavy hammer-blows and haymakers designed to leave you bruised and bloodied and gasping for breath on the canvas.

Tracks like “Built to Be Broken” and “Every Lie You’ve Spoken” quickly establish the band’s dominance with their killer combination of gargantuan, gut-wrenching guitars, neck-wrecking rhythmic hooks (including a plethora of suitably bowel-quaking breakdowns) and bellowing, bellicose vocals, and by the time the stomping, grooving title-track (whose anthemic gang vocals never fail to put a grin on my face) hits your ears – and, boy, does it hit hard – any fears that the group may have lost a step are firmly put to rest.

Of course, those fears are somewhat understandable – five years between albums is a pretty long time (although compared to a band like Deadguy it’s barely a drop in the bucket) – but getting older hasn’t made Justice for the Damned any weaker just a little bit wiser, allowing them to target their blows right where they’ll do the most damage (“Shattered” floats like a butterfly and hits like a fucking truck, while the climactic chug ‘n’ churn of “Cry Wolf” is one of the most disgustingly devastating moments on the entire album).

That being said, the band’s… cough… relentless assault can be a bit of a double-edged sword – after all, as anyone who has been in a professional fight (or fought a professional fighter, for whatever reason) will tell you, constantly repeating the same combos can get a little predictable and, ultimately, reduce their effectiveness, and so it goes with Stay Relentless whose insistence on targeting the same areas over and over eventually starts to lessen its impact a little (even though the band are still clearly putting all their weight behind every blow).

Thankfully, like all the best prize-fighters – think Rocky, or Creed, or Raging Bull (depending on your preferred era of boxing movie) – the group have saved some of their best in reserve, ready for a big comeback which demonstrates that they’ve still got a few more tricks up their sleeve(s), with “Eyes of a Killer” dipping its toes into the low ‘n’ slow Doom-core side of bands like Black Tongue and The Acacia Strain, and punishing penultimate highlight “Writhing Mass of Liars” injecting sudden bursts of blastbeats and an undercurrent of bleak, brooding melody directly into the track’s central muscle-mass.

Climaxing with the bombastic bludgeoning of “Leave You Behind” (which wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on the most recent Fit For An Autopsy album, tbh) Stay Relentless might not be quite the flawless performance it set out to be – though the only real miss is opener “Retribution In Blood”, which staggers, more than swaggers, out of the gate and gets things off to a bit of a sluggish start – but it’s more than good enough to reaffirm that Justice for the Damned absolutely belong at the top of the card.