There’s a very short list of hardcore punk records that have truly captured lightning in a bottle and made a perfect, furious statement. Distilling the essence of the anger beyond what the Sex Pistols ever managed into a sound that’s faster, harder and meaner, Minor Threat, Black Flag and Discharge all did it and then moved on immediately to weird jazz experiments or pivoting to heavy metal and alienating their entire fanbase. The debut full length Fear Of from Philadelphia’s Commitment is the closest thing we’ve heard to that sound in a very long time. Fifteen tracks in twenty minutes with no filler, fat or apologies, most of the tracks are closer to one minute than two, and the only song close to three minutes is the closer which moves through multiple lurching breakdowns before careening off again. This is what hardcore punk is supposed to be, and it’s a ferociously passionate performance.

The album opens with a forty second rager Thirsty before Let’s Begin arrives as a strange interlude that you’d expect to find on track one. Then Bukkakracy launches everything into overdrive with the kind of blunt directness that recalls Henry Rollins in the punk tradition of pulling the hypocrite’s pants down in public. The sonics stand up with the best of modern hardcore alongside Drain, Speed and all the other bands currently pushing the genre forward with clear production and real chaos. Hall of Meat is a particularly swaggering highlight, and Affirmative Action leans into the dissonant squeals you’d expect on a Knocked Loose record. The breakdowns throughout groove incredibly hard and the politics are explicity anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, feminist and queer. Commitment know exactly what hardcore punk is supposed to sound like, executing the template with such blunt directness  and hammering volume that it stands head and shoulders above the rest.