KNTRock Never Die

Melbourne maniacs KNT (pronounced phonetically) have released their debut EP Rock Never Die to dirty up your quarantine-time; four tracks of loose-screw, psycho pub rock laden with sludgy guitar tones and frenetic, spiteful energy.

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Proving brevity and wit are not always the same thing, the band crank through the EP in cracking time, with tracks averaging somewhere around two minutes and beating the speakers from behind the whole time. There are no soft verses, no nipple-touching emotional choruses, no triumphant melodies. There is no gloss, and no introspection; there is just filthy, ranting rock and roll of the nastiest order available.

Rock Never Die is a four-to-the-floor punk-rock excursion with a busted lip and a lurid grin.

Picking a favourite track is sort of pointless, as the whole thing comes in under the average human attention span anyway. You could arguably play the whole thing for a toddler and they would basically get it. You shouldn’t, but you could. It is an identifiably ‘Melbourne’ sound, where geography and density of small venues allowed some really disenfranchised lunatics to create music careers in the pub rock oeuvre, and this honours/pisses-on that legacy the way bands like Batpiss and High Tension have been doing for years; punk-rock riffing that borrows from the overdriven Ramones template, backed by speed-freak drumming and something short of Bukowski-style loser-poetry in the roared, base vocals and violently dumb lyrics.

The best moments here never last longer than a few seconds and that shouldn’t be satisfying, but the momentum of the songs never lets up long enough to feel cheated. Closer Riff manages to be the fastest and loosest sounding thing on a record full of fast and loose music, and that is something of an achievement in itself.

Rock Never Die is a four-to-the-floor punk-rock excursion with a busted lip and a lurid grin. It would be fair to imagine KNT being recommended to you buy some meth-head with a broken bottle, and it’s probably easier just to do what he says.

STANDOUT TRACKS: Dole, Riff
STICK THIS NEXT TO: High Tension, Batpiss, Clowns