Intercourse – Halo Castration Institute

In a nod to the iconic line from the film Stand By Me, the album’s opening track and first single, “Where Losers Go to Die,” kicks off with frontman Tarek Ahmed bellowing: “Hey man, want to see a dead body?” What follows is an eerie The Jesus Lizard-esque dirge that slips into a Neanderthal breakdown, serving as a perfect introduction to Intercourse’s world. Choosing brutish simplicity as their weapon of choice, the band prowls the shadowy fringes of noise rock and hardcore, a zone also occupied by the likes of Chat Pile and Couch Slut. “Were too weird for a lot of the hardcore scene and too aggro for the weird scene,” states Ahmed. The band’s sole founding member, Ahmed wields a singular vocal style that smashes the line between the sublime and the ridiculous. With a strangulated roar, almost cartoonish in its unhinged glory, Ahmed spouts painfully direct, often poetic, lyrics about the pain of existence. His songs reference a litany of characters from his own past, growing up in the backwoods of Connecticut as an Egyptian kid in the post-9/11 years, and from the annals of true crime – hitman Richard “The Iceman” Kulkinski, bulldozer enthusiast Marvin Heemeyer, and Bjork stalker Ricardo Lopez, to name a few. A 2021 write-up from No Echo hailed Ahmed as “a brilliant wordsmith I aspire to someday match in skill.” Colored vinyl. Genre: Noise Rock, Hard-core, Grind RIYL – Chat Pile, Nerver, Couch Slut, D.R.I.