Excessive Cruelty is a new band featuring key players from the Bay Area’s Strung Up, who were simultaneously one of the best-regarded and most underrated bands of the explosion of early 80s-style US hardcore in the early 2000s. If you’re smart enough to be familiar with Strung Up’s catalog (and if you’re not… do your homework!), you’ll be pleased to know that the blisteringly fast rhythms, complex riffing, gruff vocals and literate, socially aware lyrics are still very much present in Excessive Cruelty’s sound. You can also hear a touch of thrash and crossover influence here—which makes sense given that guitarist Dan Randall spent many of the intervening years since Strung Up disbanded playing in Ghoul—but like Dealing with It-era DRI or American Paranoia-era Attitude Adjustment, this is hardcore with metallic elements and not the other way around. Any way you slice it, though, this 12” delivers 6 blistering dispatches of pure rage and energy.