In three days, the brutally intense hardcore band Regional Justice Center will finally follow their excellent 2018 debut album World Of Inconvenience — as well as other records like 2020’s “KKK Tattoo” and Regional Jurtice Center — with their second full-length LP Crime And Punishment. “Full-length” feels like a bit of a misnomer here, since the 10-song album clocks in at a robust 13 minutes. But when you play this fast and this frantic, it simply makes sense for an entire LP to be half the length of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song.

Thus far, RJC have already shared the early album tracks “Absence,” “Inhuman Joy,” and “Conquest.” Today, they’ve dropped one last feral rage-bomb on the world before the album comes out. “Dust Off” is an 80-second blitzkrieg. There’s a lot in that 80 seconds, from fast chaos to methodical riff-trudge. In a recent interview for David Anthony’s Former Clarity newsletter, RJC mastermind Ian Shelton talks about how “Dust Off” is about huffing inhalants because you saw people talking about it on TV:

This record, I was just trying to take the most empathetic route to each underlying issue. In “Dust Off,” that’s a story about a family member starting to do Dust Off because they saw it on Intervention. It’s about the depravity of, in that moment, you’re doing it because you want to be fucked up. You want to pass along your hurt onto somebody else by making them experience this sheerly fucking ludicrous event. So I kind of just wanted to look at it through the lens of how you’re passing on your pain, you’re passing on your trauma, and I think that’s essentially the underlying issue with addiction: You’re attempting to pacify your trauma and transfer those feelings on to something else. And the thing that happens is that you end up creating the next generation of addicts through that. But the thing is, I’m never trying to never be judgmental about it, but it’s about trying to understand that the underlying issue to all of it is that nobody wants to feel pain. You’re trying to do everything you can to get rid of it.

Listen below.

Crime And Punishment is out 3/5 on Closed Casket Activities.