Pledge are a difficult-to-Google band from Portugal who play a dramatic, crashing form of post-hardcore. Singer Sofia M.L. has a truly great scream, a throat-shredding roar/sob that’s both ferocious and vulnerable at the same time. The rest of the band plays heavy riffage with nervous energy. If you know the slower, heavier songs that Converge sometimes put on their more recent records, usually toward the end, then you can probably try to imagine a band whose default setting is that. It’s a hell of a powerful sound.

Pledge were totally unfamiliar to me before Brooklyn Vegan posted a couple of their songs earlier this week. All the members of the band play in other bands, and I’ve never heard of any of those bands, either. Pledge released their debut EP Resilience in 2018, and they’ve just followed it with Haunted Visions, their first full-length. It’s a clangorous, moving piece of music, and you can stream it below.

Haunted Visions is out now on Raging Planet.