You’re not a feminist JUST BECAUSE YOU FUCKED ONE!” That’s Lauren Kashan, singer of the Baltimore band Sharptooth, a few songs into her band’s new album Transitional Forms. That’s Sharptooth in a nutshell: Smart and passionate and angry and unsparing. Sharptooth’s sound is a concussive big-room form of metallic hardcore, and it absolutely never lets up. But it’s also written with a pointed perspective — the type of thing where you feel compelled to read the lyrics when you can’t make them out through Kashan’s world-obliterating roar.

Today, Sharptooth release their new album Transitional Forms, the long-awaited follow-up to their 2017 debut Clever Girl. I’ve been waiting for Transitional Forms for a while. Sharptooth have developed a rep as a mean, destructive unit, and the Transitional Forms lead single “Say Nothing (In The Absence Of Content)” is a fun, layered-meta throwdown. (Kashan, just as the breakdown is kicking in: “Now this is the part of the song where we slow shit way down for you so you can all kill each other! It doesn’t even matter what I’m saying here anyway! Can you even understand a fucking word I say?”) Its deeply funny video might be the best hardcore music video in years.

Transitional Forms is everything you could’ve hoped for. It’s clean and hard and unsparing, just like the stuff that Sharptooth’s labelmates in Knocked Loose make. The riffs are nasty, the breakdowns kick hard, and the moments of gothed-out quiet are effectively ominous. It’s just a kickass hardcore record. But it’s also smarter and more self-aware than most kickass hardcore records — and it gets that intelligence and self-awareness across without skimping on the ass-kickery. Great album. Stream it below.

Transitional Forms is out now on Pure Noise Records.