Bordentown, New Jersey. Not exactly the epicenter of anything but Wawa runs and sun-bleached nostalgia. But tonight, in the fluorescent-lit bowels of Bordentown High School—yes, a goddamn high school auditorium with a functioning PA, something is happening. Something violent and ecstatic and real.

Sir Lord Baltimore didn’t just play loud. They were loud. Loud like a busted radiator in the middle of a church sermon. Loud like a jet engine made of fuzz and freak sweat. Before “metal” had a dress code or a thousand PR reps to explain it to you, these three Brooklyn burnouts were making music that tore holes in the fabric. Not to let light in, but to let demons out.

Shivan took that stage like they were summoning something ancient and pissed off. And from the first scream to the final note, the room was theirs. No hesitation. No warm-up. Just pure, detonated chaos. This wasn’t a concert. It was a full-blown conversion.

You ever fall in love with a band so fast it feels like whiplash? Like the song isn’t even done and you’re already rewinding it, chasing the high like a freak? That’s what Full Isaac did to me.

The Wicked Farleys always felt like a band playing in the room next door—close enough to feel the heat through the drywall, but never quite in reach. You could hear the thrum, the warbled vocals bleeding through insulation, the crunch of a Telecaster caught in the act of saying something honest.

Let me be clear: I didn’t discover SloBlo. I dug it up—like a half-buried, busted cassette in the back of some decaying storage unit. Because that’s what this album feels like. A thing the industry forgot to burn. An artifact that somehow slipped through the cracks of the grunge gold rush and managed to survive in the static.

They sound like tension. Like the edge of violence. Like something’s about to snap and you’re not sure if it’s the guitar cable or your neck. It’s not music you vibe to. It’s music you survive. Tight, violent, calculated chaos. You don’t hear it—you get hit by it.

Autolux never chased the spotlight. They carved their own space in the dark—drum-heavy, dream-warped, and impossible to pin down. Shoegaze for people who never stood still.