Hardcore is a rich, varied musical tradition. It’s spawned at least a few dozen subgenres and regional sounds, and different bands have proven how powerful and artistic the genre can be. It’s not just blunt, ignorant kick-you-in-your-face music. On the other hand, sometimes hardcore is just blunt, ignorant kick-you-in-your-face music, and that can be pretty great, too. For that, I give you Three Knee Deep.

Tampa’s Three Knee Deep might be the most ignorant band in the game. They’re the band you throw on when Never Ending Game feels a little too subtle and intellectual. Three Knee Deep are named after a prison-slang term for warning-stabbing. Their music is thunderous hard-chug ’90s style goon-music, with vocals that are either death-metal grunt-bellows or, more often, straight-up mook-rapping. Some of the tracks are rap instrumentals that suddenly give way to groove-metal lurches. There’s some serious rap-metal influence at work on Three Knee Deep’s music — to the point where they’ll put DJ scratches on a breakdown — but that only adds to the socially-maladjusted street-fighting force of this stuff. This is that real beat-you-up music.

Three Knee Deep released the debut EP Wrong World in 2017, and they followed it up with a two-song demo last year. Today, they’ve surprise-released their self-titled full-length debut, and it is every bit as disrespectfully heavy as anyone could possibly hope. There is absolutely nothing tasteful about this LP. If you play it around your friends, somebody will make fun of you. But fuck your friends. Kick your friends in the face. You should be social-distancing from them anyway. I love this fucking album. This fucking album makes me want to smash everything in my house and then keep punching the rubble until the pandemic ends. This is Skarhead-level stuff. This is the sort of album that ends with a song called “Mosherz Anthem.” Listen to it below.

Three Knee Deep is out now on Triple B.