Purple-X may strike you as the name of a new vape flavor, but they’re actually a band Oslo who I hope you’ll find more aesthetically pleasing than the Verizon store inside a pawn-shop inside a strip-mall vibe that your local vape shop had has cultivated.
Instead of artificial fruit flavors that smell and taste like they were mixed in a bucket in the corner of someone’s shower, Purple-X serves up a frayed and darkly groovy variety of hardcore that tangos with the angular whip of the ’00s post-punk revival to produce a sound that is as unstable and dangerous as a merry-go-round balancing on the back of a roller-coaster cart as it loops through a gravity-defying cyclone of turns.
Purple-X’s will certainly appeal to fans of Wipers and Code Orange, with their stabby melodicism and tarnishing, turpentine peel that harkens back to the harsher side of post-punk that inspired so many garage bands in the UK and US during the early part of the new Millennium, but make no mistake, Purple-X is a hardcore band!
You can definitely hear some Kira Roessler influence on the bass section of “Kali Yuga” and the d-beat adjacent grooves on “Monkey” are undeniably moshable. “Sister” is painted with that lurching quality that Minor Threat’s “Seeing Red” so crucially catchy and “Square Root” has a sharp, slicing quality to it that feels like a thousand razor blades running races along your spine with a pummeling rhythm section that easily could have been borrowed from a Torso b-side.
You can stream the entirety of Purple-X’s self-titled debut below via Bandcamp:
Get a hard copy of Purple-X self-titled album from Sheep Case Records here.
