by Khagan Aslanov (@virgilcrude)
Your favourite noise band’s favourite noise band is back. UK no-wavers USA Nails have released Feel Worse on One Little Independent Records, a legendary indie imprint that has, over the years, put out anything and everything brilliant, from Björk and Sigur Rós to Skunk Anansie. If you count their split with Psychic Graveyard (which you’d be remiss not to), this is USA Nails’ seventh album. You can hardly tell that the band behind this set of tightly-wound boilermakers is now a decade into their tenure; Feel Worse squeals and pulses with vile life.
After showing that they can write a ruminative dirge with the best of them on 2020’s Character Stop, here, USA Nails again let loose the buzz-saws. Feel Worse is 28 punch-drunk minutes of scorched, serrated punk. There are no frivolous breakdowns or tangents to find here. The songs crash in and out, leaving behind only a jarring hangover of no-wave screeching and overdriven bass. Even when the band slows things down to mid-tempo, like on the hypnotic, electronically-charged “Holiday Sea,” it feels like a cataclysm. This economical tack serves them well. Like all pent-up hermetic containers, Feel Worse feels like it’s about to burst in your hands.
As for the message lodged in this pit of cordite? According to singer and guitarist, Steven Hodson, Feel Worse is a treatise of schadenfreude, that pleasure you get from someone else’s misery. As concepts go this is pretty broad and it allows the band to burrow into man’s inhumanity. Reality TV, ego inflation, bullying, onanism, paranoia, the economy, doom-scrolling, late-stage capitalism, and general ugliness all get a notch in USA Nails’ fevered run. And yet, it feels oddly joyful to listen to Hodson and co-vocalist Gareth Thomas gleefully pile-drive through post-modern bread and circuses.
Don’t let the thick irony fool you though. Feel Worse is a grand album, and although one might miss it in the near-relentless barrage of malaise the band uncork here, their songwriting has gotten impossibly tight. Numbers like “Pack of Dogs,” and the deliriously concentric “On Computer Screen” flash a poppier face, albeit one marred by third-degree burns. With a decade of writing and touring already stamped into their boot-soles, USA Nails show little sign of running out of steam. If nothing else, this humble listener is stoked to be along for the ride!