Album Review: Batpiss - Nuclear Winter

They may have only been together for just over a year, but Melbourne trio Batpiss have somehow crafted their own post-apocalyptic world on Nuclear Winter, one full of molten ash, mesmeric annihilation and maniacal laughter. For all the bluster and necrotic noise, Batpiss are indeed taking the piss, and don't care whether you're in on the joke or not.

Recorded by The Nation Blue/Harmony provocateur Tom Lyngcoln (who also recorded The Spinning Rooms' similarly-themed feverish debut last year) upstairs at the Tote, Nuclear Winter is a bilious rollercoaster from start to finish. Seed is an atonal balltearer, plastering down the band's intent from the onset, before Drag Your Body comes on, a vehement black dream filled with desperate sweat and seething. Come Here And Fuck Off is what it says on the tin, a sucker punch of raucous abandon; Burn Below sounds like the Bronx on steroids, broken bits of teeth stuck in their steel-caps. Hollywood takes a more speed-punk approach, prepared to tear up the rails, before grinding everything down to their bare, base essentials for the brutal grind of Human. It's relentless, yet there is an inherent maniacal glee embedded within these tracks that is virally infectious. Pigsblood goes for a wind-tunnel ambient drone intro before devolving into a morass of wanton destruction; Loose Screws is a nihilistic nail-bomb of wanton fury (and arguably the strongest track here); Couldn't Get Out goes straight ahead, a supercharged bulldozer; Portal maintains a chugging intensity, always threatening yet never releasing; and fiery finale Drone grinds you into the dust.

Be warned, though – Nuclear Winter is brutal, yet brutally addictive.