Nails - Abandon All Life LP

Grindcore this compressed is not supposed to leave room for craft, but Nails make every one of Abandon All Life's roughly seventeen minutes count on their second full-length, the follow-up to 2010's Unsilent Death on Southern Lord. Kurt Ballou of Converge tracked and engineered the whole thing at his GodCity studio, and the Oxnard band used that short runtime to compress rather than build, each song landing and leaving before you can brace for it. Q magazine pegged its brutality against Napalm Death at its most grueling, which from this record is not an exaggeration.