[Artwork by Caroline Harrison]
“Nonsense” opens with a slow fade-in of distorted guitars and seismic drums — the chaos before the swarm. It’s a trick of the trade, the extreme metal equivalent of a camera operator calling out “speed” before the tail slate clacks down. But for Gadget, it might as well be the sound of a band being roused from a deep slumber. “Nonsense” kicks off the EP Coerced, which is the Swedish grind band’s first new release in nearly five years. So, naturally, during those 30-odd seconds of build-up, you think, OK, does Gadget still have it? And then the quintet literally blasts off, sounding like SpaceX’s Starship trying to take off from inside a garden shed. Guitarists Rikard Olsson and Kristofer Jankarls furiously slash with that classically corroded Swedish guitar tone; bassist Fredrik Nygren and drummer William Blackmon feverishly shovel rhythmic coal into the engines to keep the tempo at full steam; and singer Emilia Henriksson fiercely screams with a caustic roar that would greatly concern an otolaryngologist. Oh yeah, Gadget still has it. You’re just left wondering where it put it for the last half-decade.
The story on Coerced is more immediate. Nowadays, Gadget is punkier than its younger self, which favored a near-death/grind sharpness. It’s not that things are looser, necessarily: the band still plays with controlled frenzy. But Coerced accentuates more of the core of grindcore, particularly the sonic bulldozer quality of a band like Breach. A couple of factors might be responsible. First, Olsson, who alongside Gadget plays in the hardcore bands Diskonto and the severely underappreciated Parasit, handles the music writing this go-around. Second, Henriksson, who is making her studio debut as a full-fledged member of Gadget after guesting on the 2021 Retaliation split and handling live vocals for a few years, hails from the raging Radium Grrrls, which is no stranger to punk pugnacity. (Johan Lundmark, who sang on the 2020 version of Gadget’s “Funerary Rites,” pops up again on the update.) Perhaps that’s why Coerced more readily embraces a more direct approach. Heck, some songs even flirt with the d-beatish direction of fellow Swedish Assault partakers, Disfear.
I think this punk path could be misinterpreted as a spin in the Wayback Machine, a regression, helping Gadget to choose a livelier sound befitting the flesh-and-blood warmth of vinyl over the fastidiousness of past albums that found a good home on CD. However, I think Coerced‘s punkiness is a natural evolution that has followed Gadget’s staff to where they are in their lives. How do you maintain grind fury beyond your forties, when “rage, rage against the dying of the light” turns into “rage, rage we have a parent-teacher conference on Thursday”? There’s still plenty to be pissed about — lord knows this modern world supplies enough ammo. But clearly, the calculus is different because other aspects of life, and aging generally, become part of the equation. On a personal level, I find Coerced moving because it mirrors where I am as an old, decrepit powerlifter, staring down the inevitability of having to pursue a simpler routine to preserve my longevity. My drive hasn’t changed, but I am forced to reckon with the degradation of my body — I can’t escape time, and I can’t live in the past when there’s a present that needs me. In that light, it’s admirable, then, that five people have found a way to come together and make new music, stoking the same fires of aggression while saying, “You know, maybe we can be a little less technical so these songs can be released in this lifetime?” The act of doing becomes more resonant when so much of life pulls you toward something else; you feel that you’re not totally and completely hopeless keeping things in motion.
And, you know, Gadget, a really good grind band, is really good as a punk band if that’s the shift it wants to make. After an extended expedition into noise, which we’ll get into in a second, the requisite slomo grind closer kicks in, and it’s the best song of the eight-song set. “Violently Silent” is sludgy hardcore with a mid-pace pummel that gives a band like Norna a run for its money. It’s additionally powered by a killer groove that, forgive the deep cut, might remind the right listener of Swarm of the Lotus. Conceptually, it’s kind of like taking a beat to slow down, examine the things in front of you while chaos swirls around you in your continually expanding worldview, and thinking, Man, I’m even more pissed off about this than I thought. To drive that home, it sure doesn’t hurt that Henriksson lets loose the vocal hit to beat of 2026: “UHHHHHGH.” I feel that in the very depths of my frustrated soul. And I feel Gadget’s life force in general — where it is, where it wants to be. That’s Coerced‘s story, then, and, as always, Gadget does a great job telling it.
***
OK, two observations before we go. First, the noise track, “False Pulse”: What are we doing here? The five-and-a-half-minute excursion eats up a third of Coerced‘s running time, and doesn’t have the courtesy to close the record, leaving you to ponder your life decisions before finally giving way to “Violently Silent.” Like the dork I am, I listen to a lot of stuff falling under the noise umbrella, so that’s my Reddit-ass “longtime [profession] here” bona fides. Accordingly, I can tell you that, in a vacuum, “False Pulse” isn’t bad as far as those things go. Heck, it would even fit in OK on a death industrial album. But that’s the point: Coerced is not a death industrial album. For a noise or ambient passage to work on a metal album, it has to be great because it needs to justify its existence to people who don’t care about noise, and five minutes is a lot to justify. In a related realm, the power electronics that the powerviolence band No Faith employ excel because they’re short — palette cleansers by blowtorch. “False Pulse,” by comparison, is dead wax.
Second, we have an early frontrunner for album art of the year. Caroline Harrison once again threads the needle between the gorgeous and the grotesque. Many reads are possible: A bevy of open sores weep while vines sprout from others; the decomposition of the body, and a reminder that there’s life after death, it’s just not ours — we will return to the loam. Perhaps it’s also the wounds we suffer over the course of a life, where some stay fresh, and we can make them far worse by digging into them, but experience can grow from others. Fits Coerced well. Anyway, it’s as phantasmagorically evocative as ever. It’ll look great on a wall if you never want to have normal people over again.
