The latest in a seemingly endless line of high quality Aussie death/grind outfits, Remains, are set to stove your ears in with their debut album, Grind Til Death…

The band are something of a supergroup with a pedigree that stretches back through such august underground names as Captain Cleanoff, Fuck I’m Dead, King, The Day Everything Became Nothing and Blood Duster, and they’ve fused all that experience together into something they called Stadium grind. You don’t need too much imagination to see a stadium going mental to the chugging appeal of tracks like Intercorpse, or the really rather wonderful Where The Evil Comes, which is underpinned by some haunting black metal tones that really elevate the song to… well, stadium-worthy status, actually!

Shot Dead is another highlight, packing more of worth into it’s one hundred and eight second duration than many band can muster in half an album; stepping back from the record after a few spins you realise that this is where the key and the real appeal of the band lies – somewhat improbably they compress ‘real’ songs into a grind format – nothing here is over two and a quarter minutes in duration – so much compression in fact you’ll probably get the bends just listening to the semi-autobiographical Lords of Grind. But the format works, and works bloody well. In an attempt at recreating the stadium vibe in my living room I co-opted my neighbours to stand on the dining room table and pelt me with bottles of warm piss whilst I cavorted to the album’s standout track, Bleed For Me, and I’m pleased to say the experience took me back to the glory days of Holland’s Dynamo festival in the late nineties. So, this truly is stadium grind…

But, all joking apart, there’s an almost indefinable something about Remains that sets them just a little bit apart from that pack of Aussie bands I mentioned at the top of this review, a spark that rewards the listener every time they return to this belter of an album. That doesn’t always happen with grind records – it’s not really meant to, let’s be frank – but it does here, and that makes Grind Til Death a must-listen album in this reviewer’s book…

Grind Til Death releases on July 15th.