Easy to feel a general sense of exhaustion around this band, which was not that long ago a breath of fresh air in metal, really. It's by no fault of mainman/only man/who knows, man Joel Grind, who delivers his metal with such passion on the awesomely named Primal Future: 2019 it's totally impossible to not get caught up in it. It's the fault of pizza thrash, it's the fault of bands putting out 50-minute albums that harness the least fun moments in Forbidden's catalogue, it's all that stuff just wearing us down. 

But dig opener “Chemical Warlords” here as remedy to all that, Toxic Holocaust just nailing a certain retro vibe that few bands manage to capture so sincerely, Grind bringing us right back to a time and place here, not exactly reinventing anything, and not exactly wanting to. Songs like the title track show that, despite the bright colours, this is more Lemmy-loving Discharge worship than pizza thrash, Toxic Holocaust channelling a dystopian street punk vibe by way of Nuclear Assault and the most strung out of Megadeth material, tracks like “Iron Cage” positively fun, G.B.H. covering Venom, Grind drunk out of his mind and just racing through this material, which is no better or worse than any other Toxic Holocaust album, it's all Toxic Holocaust, it's all good. “Controlled By Fear” has a march and stomp to die for, the vocal lines positively channelling all that is great about this kind of scuzzy metal, Grind doing everything that he set out to do absolutely perfectly on this great album. “Cybernetic War” closes it off with the perfect mixture of trad-metal melody and crossover apoca-vibe, Grind having this formula down to an absolute science at this point, and we all benefit from the results.