Hostile Takedown are a new band from Southwestern Virginia who play a fully locked-in form of ’90s-style metallic hardcore. Singer Jack Cooper runs the crucial hardcore-related Instagram account What It Takes HC Blog, and they listen to and highlight just about every new hardcore record that comes out across the planet. Hostile Takedown sounds like music made by someone who has heard practically every hardcore record in existence, who has fully internalized the genre’s dynamics and conventions, and who knows how to make that shit work.

As No Echo points out, Hostile Takedown dropped their first release, a three-song demo, over the weekend. Those three songs are forceful, intense mid-tempo fight music, with some serious riffs and some blazing guitar solos. Cooper’s vocals are gruffly impassioned, and I especially like their work on the world-is-fucked opening track “My Will Be Done.” There’s nothing fancy about this music, but if you like hardcore, then it scratches a serious itch. Stream those three tracks below.

Demonstration is out now on Words Of Fire.