Upstate New York’s Escuela Grind are one of those acts that seems to keep the metal gossip columns of the interweb in business. Not a week goes by that some “outrage” featuring EG doesn’t float up via the usual suspects online. It is so easy to get mired in the calls for cancellation and counter claims of lies that it is easy to forget that the band are exactly that rather than Hollyoaks with blastbeats. This is not to belittle any claims that folks have made about the bands former tour manager but just to draw a line in the mosh pit sand so I can concentrate on this album.

This is the band’s third album (despite the press release saying otherwise), following on from 2022’s “Memory Theatre” which the band have been touring for the last couple of years, sharpening their chops.

This album moves further away from their debut 2018’s “Indoctrination”. That album featured 17 tracks (I am including the bandcamp bonus) of mainly blistering fast grindcore. I often still drop the gloriously punky “Incel Circle Jerk” on the radio to this day.

Here on Dreams On Algorithm the band have introduced more hardcore grooves and elements of death metal into their song writing. There are even clean vocals on new single “Turbulence” and a chance for us to hear vocalist Katerina Economou’s alternative voice. I know many people get the heebie jeebies at the thought of cleans but they actually work really well here. Katerina’s singing voice is very alt/grunge and works well with her nasty barks. The track itself is a bit mathy with some nice discordant grooves and quite different to the first single “Always Watching You” which had a more straightforward grind meets death core vibe. The Acacia Strain’s Vincent Bennett hitches his horse (or is that hoarse vox) to the Escuela bandwagon on Constant Passenger, his vocals offering a slightly different tone alongside the EG front person. They are a little bit comedy core but I have to say I am on board. (There are a few youtube skits with hardcore frontment shouting out nonsense in high hoarse rasps that his shouts remind me of – soz VB)

Moral Victory is a crowdkilling stomper of a track whilst Concept of God brings a nasty death metal urgency – it’s opening evokes Blowtorch Slaughter by CC. It soon drops into a damn nasty mosh part followed by a finger wagging blastathon.

Krissy Morash takes riffs straight outta the Gary Holt thrash 101 handbook for Animus Multiform. It has Bay Area written all over it and could drag a lot of thrash purists kick and screaming in their white tops to the EG cause.

Scorpion is a track that you wanna be blaring out of your car when you have spent the morning fighting your way round hospital and supermarket car parks and know you are not allowed to scream in people’s faces. Let Escuela Grind do it for you!

I get sent a lot of waffle from PR companies telling me what the sound of “modern metal” is in 2024.  Such hyperbole is moot – music is evolving all the time, taking parts of the old and adding bits like an old fashioned bridal custom.  Outside of the hype and controversies all bands can do is record some killer choons and force them on the worlds ears. These ten tracks are pretty damn fine and are deserving of attention – never mind the bollocks.

(8.5/10 Matt Mason) 

https://www.facebook.com/escuelagrind

https://escuelagrind.bandcamp.com/album/dreams-on-algorithms