“Silk Ash Cascade”, the opening track on this first album in nine years from grinders GridLink, starts out with a stunner, the band laying down a sort of technical and near-melodic death/grind, not at all what I'm expecting but absolutely what I'm loving, vocalist Jon Chang (of Discordance Axis fame) doing his thing to perfection all these years later. 

Drum machine/man Bryan Fajardo totally kills it behind the kit, leading the way on tech-grind follow-up “Anhalter Bahnhof”, while “Pitch Black Resolve” almost has hooks, is almost catchy, and is certainly full of the sideways riffing (courtesy of riffmaster general Matsubara Takafumi; the band is rounded out by new bassist Mauro Cordoba) and starts and stops that this band does so well. And there's dynamics, too, this song in particular having some songwriting smarts to it, as does “Nickel Grass Mosaic”'s riffs to remember, the song just going up, up, up into outer space, and I'm so along for this ride. “Ocean Vertigo” has the magic that classic Discordance Axis had, and that's a hard vibe to tap into. 

On and on it goes, “Zygomatic” blasting hard, “Refrain” blasting weird, everything blasting with that inimitable grind-as-art Chang aesthetic. Four albums in, GridLink have created their best yet, a totally essential grindcore record, completely unhinged closer “Revenant Orchard” ending things off with a head-shaker of a vocal performance, drums blasting away into the night, riffs snaking through the labyrinth, everything falling, crashing, and bashing into place perfectly.