You ever listen to an album and feel like you just got elbowed in the side of the jaw? Worn’s Human Work is like that. This isn’t a Merauder-type situation where the band sounds like they’d beat you up. It’s more that the music beats you up. Hearing some of those riffs feels like having your face rubbed on sidewalk concrete.

Worn come from the Pennsylvania city of Wilkes-Barre, and they make a raw, guttural, primal form of hardcore. Their sound has all the urgency of powerviolence, but they usually don’t get too fast. Instead, they just bear down on their crud-encrusted riffs with purpose, while singer Daniel — no last name given — screams like a swamp monster who’s just discovered that his lair has been bulldozed so that someone can build condos. It’s exhilarating shit.

Work first hit my radar in 2019, when they released a two-song single, “Total Disease” b/w “Harm You,” that sounded the way burning hair smells. Today, the band releases their full-length debut Human Work. It’s 10 songs in five minutes, and we’ve already posted the early track “Public Execution.” Lose yourself in the squalor below.

Human Work is out now on From Within Records.