REVIEW: No Cure – …For the Stainless Steel [EP/2022]

Artist: No Cure
Album: …For the Stainless Steel – EP

Rigid, unmoving, cold and precise—the words that come to mind when one imagines stainless steel. Maybe it’s the surgeon in me, but when it comes to metals (of the elemental kind, not the musical kind—more on that soon), despite it being common, there are none so precious as the unforgiving and unbiased stainless steel. When it comes to the debut effort by straight edge metalcore act No Cure, …For the Stainless Steel takes on several meanings. With a message as bold and unbudging as high grade steel and riffs that cut as sharp as a stainless scalpel, …For the Stainless Steel is a ruthless and raunchy offering that provides an unbridled DIY assault on the listener’s senses. No Cure are a young, ambitious band built from passion and driven by unbridled vitriol that stand to obliterate anything that dare stand in their way.
…For the Stainless Steel, despite its poetic name, is an unforgiving, raunch-riddled and malevolent homage to pure metalcore. The percussion throughout the release is constantly pummeling—beating the listener to submission into seconds—with dense bass and scathing fretwork that is nothing short of immolating. From the very onset of “Open Wide,” the listener is greeted with a harshly metallic hell as a grim riff rolls in just moments before splashy cymbals and a low, rumbling bass steamroll the listener. From then on out, it’s pure chaos. “Laceration Divine” blends riff-heavy moments of near-thrash with jarring breakdowns, just as “Your Feeble Neck” is a more bare-bones and brutal assault on the listener. This one-two punch of death and thrash infused metal and raw metalcore continues, hammering the listener into oblivion. Songs like “Your Feeble Neck” and “…For the Stainless Steel” highlight this best, both with towering ten-ton leads that topple on the listener in the form of immense breakdowns. Similarly, “Laceration Divine” manages to stomp the listener out, despite spending most of its run-time as a moderately paced death metal cut. “Occupational Retaliation” sees No Cure at their grooviest—of course, only transiently, as they shortly thereafter delve into a maelstrom of metallic malevolence. Throughout the EP’s brief runtime, No Cure make it abundantly evident that despite being a new and relatively minimalist project, the band members’ collective experience exudes, giving the listener tons of talent and aggression in a short and relatively unassuming package.
Now, just because No Cure are a straight edge band (which I find appealing, but also may understandably put some people off) doesn’t mean the straight edge is the sole topic of discussion throughout the band’s seven tracks of chaos. Where “XXX Revenge” might be a more overt nod to the band’s inclinations (and a strong cover of the original Project X track), much of the EP doesn’t necessarily feel like a straight edge release. Instead, the listener is met with about fifteen minutes of varied lyrical and vocal content that ranges from introspection to societal discontent and just about everything in between. Ultimately, where the band’s vocal element doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it does serve its purpose—to incite frenzy. The band is primal and aggressive to a tee, and the vocal element with its gritty raw yells and burly bellows absolutely nails that—though it isn’t for those in search of insane vocal acrobatics.
At the end of the day, No Cure is a DIY project through and through. No bullshit, no filler, nothing fancy or overproduced—instead it is a gritty, spit-shined dive into a head-on crash between hardcore and death metal, and throughout its modest runtime, it doesn’t give the listener any room to breathe. …For the Stainless Steel is fun, heavy and stops the listener dead in their tracks, and for a debut EP, it’s hard to ask for anything more.

9/10
For Fans Of: xWeaponx, Inclination, Vatican, I AM
By: Connor Welsh