The Nashville hardcore band Thirdface aren’t fucking around. The band’s style is a heavy churn, but it’s also got a whole lot of bounce. They sound like they’d be really, really fun live. We won’t get to find out about that until who knows when, but this spring, the band will release their debut album Do It With A Smile. They just dropped the LP’s lead single, and it’s a ripper.

Thirdface recorded their new album in the attic of a free-standing garage where some of the members of the band were living. The members of the band wrote the album together, and drummer Shelby Poole, who also plays in the metal band Yautja, recorded it. The LP follows the band’s 2019 demo A Demonstration Of Righteous Aggression. Last year, Thirdface released the one-off singles “Grasping At The Root” and “Legendary Suffering,” both of which are on the album, along with re-recordings of a couple of tracks from the demo. The album also features “Villains!,” a feverish stomp with a bassline that reminds me of mid-’90s noise-rock and a commendably rabid performance from singer Kathryn Edwards.

Edwards tells Brooklyn Vegan that “Villains!” draws parallels between a legendary anime and the crushing reality of wage-slave life: “When writing ‘Villains!,’ I was watching a lot of Fist Of The North Star, which gives the song its title. I wanted to write a song about tearing some evil down from its pedestal like Ken from FOTNS would do, but decided to speak on reality which has a lot more inescapable horrors and villains. This one is about the irons of wage slavery.” Check it out below.

Do It With A Smile is out 3/5 on Exploding In Sound, a label that’s never put out a hardcore record before.