Chain Reaction are a Belgian band with a crushingly simplistic and brutal take on hardcore. Members of the band are also in groups like Rise And Fall and Congress. Like Pittsburgh’s Unreal City, who released a great album a few months ago, Chain Reaction take clear inspiration from Integrity, the Cleveland pioneers of metallic hardcore. Chain Reaction’s lead barker Bjorn Dossche even sounds a whole lot like Dwid Hellion. But Chain Reaction also have a primal tough-guy strut that recalls the pure caveman years of New York hardcore.

Today, Chain Reaction have come out blasting with a new EP called Figurehead, the follow-up to their 2017 EP Hangman and their 2019 split with the band Spark. Figurehead has six songs, and all of them make me want to grab a Russian mobster and rip off the entire bottom half of his face like that scene in The Boys. If you haven’t yet decided whether this is your kind of thing, please devote one minute and 40 seconds to the opening track “Disconnect” and see if you don’t immediately embark on a gory five-state rampage. Stream the EP below.

The Figurehead EP is out now on Atomic Action Records/Control Records.