Enforced - Kill Grid (2021) Hi-Res

Enforced are a fists-in-the-air metal band. Some metal bands make music that demands headbanging while others necessitate tornado-like circle pits. And there are bands that crank out riffs that listeners may as well be legally required to swing along with, either in the pit or in their bedrooms. You can and should do all of these things while listening to Enforced's new album Kill Grid, but you must keep those fists raised the whole time.

The Richmond, VA band play a hybrid of hardcore and thrash metal that's commonly referred to in the heavy underground as crossover. The style's roots go back to the late eighties when bands like Suicidal Tendencies, D.R.I., and even the Cro-Mags began merging the whipping intensity of thrash with the raw and intimate aggression of hardcore. In recent years, bands like the late, great Power Trip, Iron Reagan, and the also-defunct Red Death have revived crossover for a modern audience, but Enforced feel like the torchbearers for yet another generation. Their 2019 debut At the Walls was a perfectly competent entry in that canon, but Kill Grid, their first for metal household Century Media, sounds like an instant classic. It has all of the meaty thrust of thrash metal and the stage-diving inertia of hardcore, but there's also a third element in the mix that gives Enforced their signature sound: death metal. This band is simply heavier, harder, and nastier than anyone else who's done this style within the last decade, and the differences are obvious. The husky production, arena-sized drumming, and guitar tones that rival the din of a buzzing tractor combine to bring Kill Grid to a level that's simply unmatched in their corner of the heavy world. There are straight-up death metal whirrs in the seven-minute title track and double-bass kicks at the end of "Trespasser" that draw more from Obituary than Metallica. And the way the songs back-flip between steel-toed whollops and rubber-burning speed allows Enforced to avoid monotony. When it comes to crossover, it really does not get better than this.