The Seattle-based hardcore band Regional Justice Center started out a few years ago as a songwriting collaboration between drummer/frontman Ian Shelton and his incarcerated brother. Since then, RJC has mostly been Ian’s concern, but the whole project hasn’t lost any of its frantic, visceral hate for a system that mechanistically chews up and spits out its own people. You can hear that all over the band’s new album Crime And Punishment, an ambitious hardcore record that sounds something like a rabid boar screaming at you for 13 minutes.

Crime And Punishment follows RJC’s 2018 full-length debut World Of Inconvenience, as well as the great 2020 records “KKK Tattoo” and Regional Jurtice Center. (Last year, Shelton also launched the new bands Militarie Gun and Sex With A Terrorist.) The new album is a short, fast burst of a record, but it’s also complicated and layered, with lots of little individual parts in the minute-long songs. Shelton is fond of saying that he took certain drum parts from the Beatles, and the band recorded the album with Drain/God’s Hate producer Taylor Young, who knows how to make a heavy band sound grimy and huge at the same time.

We’ve already posted the early Crime And Punishment tracks “Absence,” “Inhuman Joy,” “Conquest,” and “Dust Off.” But those tracks aren’t really meant to be heard in isolation; you just have to give the album less than a quarter-hour to knock you all around. Stream it below.

Crime And Punishment is out now on Closed Casket Activities.