Ah, the life of the grinder, where you wait patiently for one of your most-anticipated releases of the year… and it’s finally here… and it’s fourteen minutes long.
But hey, at least, these are fourteen absolutely kick-ass minutes. That’s more than many bands manage across their whole career.
And of course, the reason that Gatekeepers was one of my most looked-forward-to releases of this year is because… well, that’s pretty much what I was expecting. Australian grind duo Meth Leppard have been bashing skulls for a decade now, through a series of splits (with the kingly likes of Deterioration, Axis Of Despair, Blight Worms, and others) and one other full-length, 2020’s Woke, which rightly landed a spot on my best-of list that year (and was only fifteen minutes long, itself). So Gatekeepers is the band’s second actual album, and yeah, it’s every bit of the rager that Woke was and is, and goddammit, this is what I wanted.
And what is that, you ask, after three paragraphs? Well, it’s riffy as hell, blastbeat-heavy grinding, with Ryan Cheesman’s indistinct bellowing through short bursts of pure savagery that still manage catchiness, even within the chaos. Gatekeepers is that, exactly that, and to a goddamn tee. From the blistering riffs of the opening title track, through a series of similar but still distinct ragers. “Algorithm & Blues” drops into a swaggering midtempo rff; “Oligarchy Bukkake” shifts down into a groovier, thrashier vein, one in which Meth Leppard excels; the wonderfully titled “HPV Lovecraft” is pure grind badassery… In a genre where riffs are often indistinct, Meth Leppard provides them, up front and center, with beatdown crush-grooves to balance the blasting. By the time “Idiocracy” wraps up, it’s been only fourteen minutes, but it’s been fourteen heavy-as-hell minutes, and that’s why we came, right?
But hey, now I’m waiting for the next fourteen… I’ll be playing this relentlessly until then.
