Some bands make you feel like testing out a new pair of slippers in the local library. Other bands, maybe you’ll throw a beer down your throat before skating down a ravine. But the best type of bands make you wanna tear off your own ears and clamp ‘em to the heads of everyone you hold dear, while you scream ‘YOU CAN HEAR WHAT I’M HEARING, RIGHT?’ Denim & Leather are the latter type. They mainly sound like Pissed Jeans flipping over a cement mixer while Kira-era Black Flag stand in a circle around ‘em, throwing firecrackers. Except for when they don’t – then they sound like the wooziest buncha too-cool-for-you guitar-slingers around, with lips curled to implausible angles. Sacred Autism is their debut album and you owe it to yourself to go deaf to it at the earliest opportunity. Wanna hear what pure euphoria feels like? Cathedral Gardens is all punk energy and corrosive fury, the reason you got into this whole mess. Hatchlings is The Stooges starting a brickfight, then smirkingly denying all involvement. Ancient Cowboy Burial Ground, meanwhile, is serious business. Think you can knock a band who share a name with a Saxon album? Just try it. Denim & Leather just made the best hardcore album you’ll hear this year, leaving everyone else with the unenviable task of attempting to follow it. Buy it, catch ‘em live, then steal a cop car and see if it’ll run on cheap lager. It’s a logical progression, trust me. Will Fitzpatrick.