- Over the past half decade New York hardcore act Show Me the Body have, impressively, been able to carve out a sound of their own in a genre that isn’t exactly conducive to inimitability; and I say that with all due respect to hardcore punk music. To suggest that I’ve developed an affinity for the genre over the last few years would be an understatement, but I’d be lying if I said I found it typically easy to distinguish hardcore bands by sound.

Show Me the Body first emerged in 2016 with Body War, a post-hardcore album that, astonishingly, managed to incorporate rap rock without being completely lame. Their follow up LP in 2019, Dog Whistle, featured less rap and more noise -a nice development in sound- and just as good as its predecessor. In between those two albums the band also put out a mixtape, Corpus I, in which they collaborated with a number of artists to bring fresh voices and approaches to punk. That tape was criminally underrated and their collaborations with Dreamcrusher, Moor Mother and Eartheater were especially noteworthy.

The band’s new three-track EP Survive is a little easier to pigeonhole than that mixtape and stays true to their two LPs. As Coronavirus was ravaging the band’s hometown of New York in 2020, their Corpus collective of artists offered virtual self-defence classes, so it makes sense that Survive covers themes of resistance against authority and the ruling class.

Bone-crushing synthesizers provide a welcome introduction on the opening track Rubberband, as vocalist Julian Cashwan-Pratt emotes a dysphoria with a fundamentally broken society, snarling: “I wasn’t meant for this earth / Understand me / It don’t make it better or worse”. People On TV is a macabre cut, as Cashwan-Pratt channel surfs, watching various people die on television. Over ferocious guitars he accuses politicians of crying crocodile tears and laments a general numbness to wasted lives.

The final, titular cut, is Show Me The Body's ultimate warcry, fighting back against overarching power structures, with the fierce guitars and drums offering plenty of fuel to startle us out of our apathy. “I never cry watching pigs die” is a phrase the band repetitiously return to on this track, with the song being the clearest display of this general theme of otherness between the common man and authoritarian structures across the project.

It would be nice to hear more of the genre-defying approaches they took on the Corpus collaboration mixtape, but nonetheless this EP provides plenty of ammunition to blow up the apparatus of inequality, riven through contemporary society. Although the themes of this project could be viewed as a response to the status quo in the United States, Show Me the Body’s continued rallying cry to fight transcends borders. Oppression is a global issue and this band want to wake us up to it. As Cashwan-Pratt says: “it’s no longer enough to survive”.

- Jack Jones.