Four years ago, I went to an aftershow for a punk festival where all the bands seemed to fit a certain theme. On a four-act bill, most of the bands had at least one member who wore a Sepultura shirt, and all of them had frontmen who eventually took their shirts off. As the night went on, all those guys seemed to get progressively huger and more intimidating. The last band on the bill was the Flex, from Leeds, whose lead singer Tom Pimlott looked like an angry brick wall.

Pimlott was also the frontman of Violent Reaction, the Leeds band who basically kicked off the insane wave of recent UK punk and hardcore. Former members of Violent Reaction have gone on to bands like Chubby & The Gang, Higher Power, the Chisel, and Big Cheese. When Pimlott started the Flex, they were contemporaries of bands like Violent Reaction and Arms Race. Those bands have since broken up, but the Flex are still standing, and they just released a nasty new album.

The Flex’s new LP Chewing Gum For The Ears is their first record since the 2018 EP Flexual Healing Vol. 7. It’s a raw, frantic blast of basement punk that sounds like ’80s Agnostic Front getting into a back-alley brawl with Discharge. Stream it below and maybe jump off of something.

Chewing Gum For The Ears is out now on Static Shock Records.