The New Jersey band Deadguy released exactly one album, 1995’s Fixation On A Co-Worker. That album is a straight-up classic of punishing riffs and bad feelings. Deadguy were on Victory Records, the same label that gave us Earth Crisis and Snapcase and Integrity and Hatebreed, and they came from that same raw-throated, roaring ’90s metallic hardcore school. But Deadguy also clearly picked up a few tricks from the dense, angular noise-rock of that era. They sounded like angry, disturbed people.

25 year later, former Deadguy frontman Tim Singer, who’s also spent time in bands like Kiss It Goodbye and No Escape, has resurfaced with a new band called Bitter Branches. The band also features veterans of bands like Calvary, Go For The Throat, and Walleye, and they make the same sort of grimy, intense, dark hardcore that made Deadguy so fascinating. If anything, Bitter Branches draws even more on confrontational ’90s scuzz-rockers like the Jesus Lizard and Unsane.

Bitter Branches recorded their debut EP This May Hurt A Bit over a couple of days this past March, just before the pandemic arrived. It has come out today, arriving into a profoundly different world that has real need of some strangled, furious, ugly, noisy hardcore. You can stream it below.

The This May Hurt A Bit EP is out now on Atomic Action Records.