Much like how I've long said that Misery Index is one of the few bands today that carries the feel of Assück in their music, Nails is one of the few that carries the feel of the mighty His Hero Is Gone with them. For their Nuclear Blast debut, the band has not prettied things up in the slightest: the production is devastating, the songs go from raging d-beat hardcore to grind to a punk/metal hybrid that brings to mind Converge and Converge only, even if Nails really sounds nothing like Converge. At 22 minutes, it's positively epic for a band whose last full-length was 17 minutes (their debut was 14), but it's still short enough to maximize impact for music this intense (stop that pattern, though, guys: the short albums work very well for you, although the fact that 8 of this album's minutes are in one song is not lost on me). 

You gotta start at the beginning and play through to the end with albums like this, but if you must pick and choose, go for mid-album rager “Violence Is Forever”, which combines old-school Florida DM stomp-'n'-solo with punk fury and crust-punk desperation. From there, “Savage Intolerance” brings both grindcore and a chaotic take on a ragged, noisy metallic hardcore that both decimates and energizes. Then listen to every other song on this incredible album, as it sums up more than any other 2016 release to date what is great and life-affirming about extreme music. Feedback-drenched closer “They Come Crawling Back” (the aforementioned 8-minute tune, which is longer than five of this band's usual songs) proves it, an incredibly strong way to end this highly recommended album.