The Chicano community of Mexican heritage living in the U.S.A. have been demonised, despised and used as a political football, with their very identity weaponised by forces that would rather they didn’t exist. La Tierra Arriba / El Abismo Abajo is a record with lyrics that will be wholly unfamiliar to many, but a passion, ferocity and intensity of feeling that makes the language feel secondary.

Quiet Fear are a Los Angeles post-hardcore band rooted in the Chicano DIY scene, and their sophomore full-length is thirty minutes of urgent, furious and technically precise emotional devastation. At The Drive-In, Glassjaw, Poison The Well, Botch and Converge are all crucial in the DNA, music that was in its original form more concerned with the personal than the outright political. On La Tierra Arriba / El Abismo Abajo the personal and the political are the same thing, because their very identities are under attack.

What separates this from simple hardcore is the guitarists, who are never playing simple block chords or chugs, and are always doing something in the top end with their little finger to make every chord more anguished and emotionally loaded, with picked arpeggios yearning against the chaos. The album opens with Tiniebla, a lumbering minute-long head-banger before Retén begins with a manic scream and the record tears away at full fury for most of its duration. Sophistry is a massive highlight with an eerie, unnerving riff running through the verses as the pace and urgency of everything around it rasies your heart rate relentlessly before the anguished chorus hits.

The gang vocals throughout the record are particularly powerful, with most of the vocals screamed with throat-shredding passion and the group joining in with a cathartic all-for-one quality. Insurgentes is the album’s longest and most ambitious track as the groove keeps switching up with tumbling drum rolls. The drumming gets into full blast beat mode regularly, the noise of the room audible in the recording, and the record doesn’t try to be contemporary. Quiet Fear sound like a band who absolutely love the angsty music of the 2000s and want to exist inside it as a living tradition rather than nostalgia.

This is a terrific record that communicates regardless of language, driven by real feelings and impossible circumstances. It couldn’t have been recorded in the early 2000s because the production quality, the intensity of the drumming and the ferocity of the vocals exceed most of what that era produced, and a great deal of what came out of that trend was much less authentic than this. La Tierra Arriba / El Abismo Abajo comes from a deep love and a genuine understanding of the classics of that period.

If your life feels like a prison, whether through school, a shitty job, racism, strict parents, or any of the thousand ways that systems of power make existence feel unbearable, then music like this has always been a physical release. La Tierra Arriba / El Abismo Abajo will set you free for thirty minutes, with manic and cathartic arms-flailing bodies-in-the-pit energy in every second.