You have to love a band name like Rat Cage. When a band picks a name like that, you know exactly what you’re getting. The Sheffield group makes the kind of frantic, intense, ripshit-angry hardcore punk that evokes images of fleas, diseases, and desperate pent-up energy, and they deliver on that. We last heard from Rat Cage when they dropped four tracks on Screaming Death, a four-way split LP that also featured Sweden’s Dissekerad and America’s Destruct and Scarecrow. Now, Rat Cage have another split with another Swedish punk band.

Hudiksvall’s Gefyr make the kind of guttural, overdriven D-beat that Swedish bands routinely do better than anyone else. (Google Translate can’t do anything with the band name, so I can’t tell you want it means.) Gefyr have been releasing records since 2017, and they came out with a self-titled LP two years ago. On the new split, Rat Cage and Gefyr drop three songs each, and all six are out-of-control bangers. Listen to both sides below.

The Rat Cage/Gefyr split is out now on Flyktsoda Records/Bunker Punks.