Punchline Hunting Season Pack Fierce Experimental Hardcore On New EP — Listen Here!

Belgium’s Punchline Hunting Season deliver a wildly crushing rockslide of sound on their new experimental hardcore EP, Lonesome in Aisle 7. The record is available on cassette via Tomb Tree Tapes, who’ve got 56 copies with a multi-colored swirl on the tapes that matches the album art (& The Ghost is Clear Records has a 100-copy CD edition). Get a first listen below! 

Punchline Hunting Season perform invigorating jams. The group performs a kind of combination of crushing post-metal with noisy hardcore, and their particular sound feels broadly reminiscent of the invitingly familiar trend of mash-ups of post-rock and screamo — here, the band just gets super heavy, for starters. The riffing and drum rhythms feel cavernous, and listening to the EP feels a bit like jamming along with the band in a packed club as pieces of the building itself fall apart.

The tracks “Nosepulking Turbo” and “Senior Citizen’s Arrest” lean into the band’s post-metal elements, with extended, somewhat more restrained-feeling melodies that still pack heavy bass and uneasily build into more of a kick.

“Post-disposession depression,” meanwhile, opens with almost a minute of streaks of electric guitar melody that feel like they’re tantalizingly lighting the path for the rest of the song. The song subsequently enters a segment that’s still quite melody-driven but feels absolutely staggeringly heavy. The basslines feel perfectly pummeling, and the energy of the rhythms helps drive in the gut-rattling impact. After a couple of minutes of the song have passed, the band temporarily return to more contemplative, math rock-adjacent textures, but they don’t stick around for long — the song’s invigorating conclusion features wallops of searing performances.

“Norwegian Karaoke Combat Gone Bad,” which closes the EP, sounds a bit more drum-oriented, although the super heavy bass riffing is never far out of earshot. The drum performance on the track delivers a cacophonous series of melodies that seem to simultaneously suggest unease and a desperate lurch forward. It’s a wildly hard-hitting encapsulation of chest-thumping, limb-flailing energy — it’s hard not to imagine the band blasting out their performances of the songs in some humid venue.

If you’re in the U.S., order cassette copies at this link. If you’re outside the U.S, order at this link. CD copies are at this link.

Listen to Lonesome in Aisle 7 by Punchline Hunting Season below!

Check out an image below of what you can get!