Sometime in 1996 or 1997, I bought a cassette copy of Unorthodox, the debut album from the Brooklyn hardcore band Indecision, at an American Legion Hall punk show. Indecision weren’t even playing that show, and I don’t know why I bought the tape. Maybe I just liked the cover art? No idea. But that album just ripped the brain matter out of my skull, and a lot of that came down to the elemental screech of frontman Tom Sheehan. Turns out Sheehan’s voice has lost absolutely nothing in the past 25 years.

Sheehan got kicked out of Indecision in 1998, and he went on to front Most Precious Blood, a band made up of mostly ex-Indecision members. These days, Sheehan works as a lawyer who advocates for incarcerated people, and he’s one of the hosts on the hardcore podcast Axe To Grind, which I like a lot. Every once in a while, he’ll play an Indecision reunion show. (Justin Brannan, Sheehan’s bandmate in Indecision and MPB, is now on the New York City Council.) Sheehan is also the frontman of a new band called Colossus. They released their first demo today, and it absolutely fucking rips.

Colossus is a supergroup of sorts. Guitarist Mike Shaw and drummer Jay Peta are both in the great Hudson Valley hardcore band Mindforce, while bassist Jack Xiques is in Age Of Apocalypse, a New York metallic hardcore band that put out a really cool record last year. (I like the idea of Xiques naming all his bands after X-Men references. But Xiques is also in Pillars Of Ivory, a sort of conceptual rap/hardcore project, with Peta, and I don’t think that name has anything to do with X-Men.) In this No Echo interview, Sheehan says that the other members of the band recorded the demo without telling him about it but that they wrote the songs specifically with Sheehan in mind. The idea was to put together a groove-centric hardcore band where the bass is the lead instrument. They succeeded in a big way.

The Colossus demo is four songs and six minutes long, and that’s including a long audio clip of Ed Harris, in the movie Gone Baby Gone, telling you that he’s going to lay you the fuck down. But those four songs are tough as hell, and Sheehan’s voice sounds amazing. I can’t wait for this band to do more. Stream the demo below.

The Colossus demo is out now on Triple B Records.