Album Review: Terror – “Still Suffer” (Hardcore)

Written by Ellis

It is not lost on me that I have come out of an unintentionally long review hiatus to talk about an album that everybody knows is gonna be good anyway, but if I ever pass on the opportunity to say nice things about Terror please know that someone has taken my family and I am operating under duress. This is the best hardcore band of the 21st century with no asterisk needed anywhere near that, back with what’s being billed as their tenth full-length album although I actually think it’s their ninth as I concur with the likes of No Echo and The Metal Archives that Lowest of the Low was an EP. Anyway, we’re not here to count we’re here to fuckin’ rock and with Still Suffer coming out on one of the hottest labels in the scene in Flatspot Records one should have no trouble doing exactly that.

Even with the remarkable consistency of their discography in mind, excitement for this one feels particularly justified given the strength of its 2022 predecessor Pain Into Power, which saw the band team up with OG guitarist and Nails mastermind Todd Jones as producer to trim even the tiniest amount of fat and craft an 18-minute ripper that stands with a fair shout for a place in their top three (alongside the aforementioned Lowest of the Low and 2004’s One With the Underdogs for my money). Jones is back for this one, joined this time by engineer Taylor Young (of Twitching Tongues and God’s Hate and all that), who is also credited with some additional production, and with mixing and mastering from Jon Markson and Brad Boatright respectively.

It is Markson’s involvement that is perhaps most interesting here. He has credits on a load of Drug Church records, the last couple of Drain LPs, and even the most recent Story So Far album—all evidence of a slightly more ‘polished’ pedigree which translates on Still Suffer to a crisp and spacious mix. Nick Jett’s drums sound absolutely massive, the bass is chunky, the guitars are sharp, and the inimitable Scott Vogel stands front and centre and booming throughout, ready to share the mic with an inevitable onslaught of stage divers as he deals in bread and butter themes of owning your shit and finding strength through adversity and turning your back on haters and traitors and so on with his usual ‘angriest life coach in the world’ type panache.

The tracks themselves are all the bangers or ragers or ass-beaters they should be, with all but one clocking in at under three minutes and even the exception only falling outside of that on a technicality which I’ll get to in a moment. The title track is an early highlight—a chugging steamroller of a verse and a catchy chorus stuffed with gang vocals running into the guaranteed bone-juddering breakdown to close. “Destruction of My Soul” a couple further along is another and maybe the most pissed on the record, with Vogel’s snarl of “There’s only one way out / Burn it to the fucking ground” setting up another dick-swinging, sick-riffing breakdown to close.

Later on, “Beauty in the Losses” starts with a well-placed hip-hop type interlude courtesy of Jay Peta of Mindforce and Crush Your Soul, who in turn jumps in for another bouncy highlight when the song itself kicks in, while penultimate track “To Hurt the Most” forces the third mention of Lowest of the Low in this review as its sub-90-second runtime careens by with the kind of blistering intensity that the band came tearing out the gates with almost 25 years ago. In the midst of all this, perhaps the closest Still Suffer comes to a surprise is the guest spot of Chuck Ragan of one of Vogel’s well-documented faves in Hot Water Music on fifth track “Fear the Panic”. While having a gruff voice is essentially Ragan’s whole deal, he straight up attacks his four bars here, with way more ferocity than one might have expected given his more tuneful regular gig. It’s a shame they had to let this particularly vicious cat out the bag early by releasing it as a single, but, as everyone keeps telling me, that is just the game nowadays.

Ok fine, a bit of criticism: the last five minutes or so of closer “Deconstruct It” are unnecessary. The track itself is a proper chonky beast, made chonkier still by a pair of monstrous turns from Brody King of God’s Hate and Dan Seely of King Nine, but after about two minutes it ends with a bit of silence followed by what is essentially just Vogel’s answering machine played over another Peta produced Wu Tang type beat. Everyone from Andrew Vacante of Combust to Austin Sparkman of Haywire to Aaron “Knuckles” Butkus of Death Threat dials in to talk hardcore or tour memories or just to pay homage to a band that definitely deserves it, but it does go on a fair bit and in turn pushes the runtime to around 27 minutes instead of the tight 22 it would have been otherwise. Maybe this is the band’s way of subbing for the lost art of shouting out your friends and influences in the liner notes—and if it gets someone into some of the deeper cuts like Krutch then all power to them—but it’ll probably be a skip for most people after they’ve heard it once, especially because it’s right at the end of the record.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Bottom line is it’s Terror init. Why have you read this? Thanks if you have but honestly you should have known this was gonna be great. If you are completely unfamiliar with the band Still Suffer is a strong place to start, particularly for its fantastic production, and if that is the case and you like what you hear then you my friend are in for the discography run of a lifetime. MORE STAGE DIVES.