UNIFORM (US) Uniform announce their fifth solo album, American Standard, to be released on 23rd August via Sacred Bones. The first single "This Is Not A Prayer" is a driving force of a song, propelled by the dual drums of Michael Sharp and Michael Blume. American Standard is surely Uniform's most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new. There's a grandeur, due in part to the addition of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Blume, marking his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg's arrangements, matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter. BAD BREEDING (UK) Hailing from Stevenage, England, the first new town to be declared under the 1946 New Town Act, Bad Breeding are an anarcho-punk four-piece delivering punishing blasts of ferocious noise that draws influence from the original British pioneers of the scene; Crass, Rudimentary Peni, and Flux of Pink Indians. More than perhaps any other contemporary punk band, Bad Breeding seem preternaturally able to make music that sounds the way it feels to live in today's world. After almost a decade's worth of work, they offer no easy diatribes about the failures of neoliberalism, the war on the working class, and the unfolding horror of climate change. Instead, in complex layers of sound and structure, Bad Breeding projects a viable path forward: envisioning a future unfettered by the state and finding power in community, solidarity and worker-led organisation. VVK 17 // AK 20