False Reality open their debut album with a minute of alarms blaring, barked threats, and guitars squealing like they’re being tortured. Before you can process what’s happening, Rachel Rigby screams ‘FALSE REALITY’S BACK’ and the band drops into the most ferocious two-step of the year. Faded Intentions is a London hardcore record shaped by betrayal, community and brotherhood with metal shredding, double-kick drums and pinch harmonics that shriek like Kerry King’s divebombs.

The soul of this band is blunt, direct, unadorned, street-level hardcore and the attitude throughout is pure Hatebreed, but the musical vocabulary pulls gleefully from thrash, groove metal, nu-metal 2000s discordance, and modern metalcore. Despite the variation, it never sounds like a Frankenstein of influences because each song has one clear purpose - destroy the pit.

Rachel Rigby screams with the same upper-register ferocity as Knocked Loose’s Bryan Garris with a rasp that sounds like she’s scraping bone. The band behind her are all absolute veterans who’ve done their time in the scene, and you can hear it in how tightly they operate with riffs that feel like Machine Head at their grooviest. The drumming is in a constant state of blasting, skittering combustion, dropping into half-time and then revving the tempo up like a smashed accelerator.

Reality Slips is a swaggering single that rips through all their trademarks in rapid succession before launching into overdrive at the 60-second mark and punching gleefully from every direction. The biggest shock comes on track six, Sonder where for the first 2 minutes you think you’re getting a gothic ballad of washed-out melancholy ambience. The guitars alternate between forlorn major and despairing minor, drums anchored with funereal patience. On this song Rachel sings and sounds completely authentic, somber and exposed in a moment of vulnerability...

...and then it turns out the whole thing is just the longest fucking intro, and they rip your head clean off again.

It’s a gutsy trick and it works, using restraint and tenderness as bait and misdirection. Elsewhere Out of Time nods to Slayer’s South of Heaven before tearing away in another frenzy but thematically they’re far closer to Jamie Jasta’s genuine and defiant survival than anything satanic.

Faded Intentions hits so hard because False Reality aren’t tourists. They know exactly why this scene matters, why hardcore saves people, and why the pit is a place of catharsis rather than violence. Their entire debut sounds like a band arriving fully formed and completely committed. A ferocious opening statement from a band who already feel essential.