What is even happening in the Bay Area right now? Every week, we seem to get a new slab of stupendously heavy windmill-friendly hardcore from Northern California. Bands like Drain and Sunami are doing huge things, but it goes way beyond them — to Big Boy and Slowbleed and Torena and Extinguish and Field Of Flames, who just dropped the ultra-nasty EP Suspend Your Life last week. Now, we must also add Outta Pocket to the mix. It does not stop.

Outta Pocket got started during the pandemic, and the band, at least as far as I can tell, doesn’t share any members with any of the big Bay Area bands. They released their demo in 2020, and they followed it with the 2021 EP Purest Pain. Earlier this year, Outta Pocket played some dates on the massive Drain tour, and they recently swung through the East Coast on their first headlining tour.

Outta Pocket’s sound is rough and unrelenting, and it owes a lot to beatdown and death metal. Their full-length debut Waste Of A Man lasts for all of 14 minutes, and those 14 minutes are time well spent. Some of the riffs on this thing go stupid hard; my favorite song on the whole record might be the 53-second outro. Stream Waste Of A Man below.

Waste Of A Man is out now on Streets Of Hate.