The darkest corners of Bandcamp have been littered with a myriad of lo-fi electro punks across the last few years, plenty fantastic, some charitably labelling themselves as ‘noise punk’ as a convenient excuse for directionless, derivative dirge. Thankfully Californian 20-year-old Riley Ponce has been cutting the wheat from the chaff since 2021 with a string of abrasive hardcore releases under his Badge Grabber moniker that melds Big Black’s drum-machine muscle with dirty garage metal. After a year and a half of delays, BG’s debut album finally sees the light of day on his DIY label, Mute Cinema City Records.

On FALLOPIAN TUBE AMPLIFIER, songs are brutishly expelled with extreme ferocity. Matching the all-capitals song titles and dense, lyrical stream-of-conscious crudeness with its bruising pummel, album opener ‘SMOKING A CARDBOARD CIGARETTE’ packs throat-shredding screams, discordant electrical scree and frenzied drumming, all in 55, volatile seconds that nod to Songs About Fucking‘s ephemeral first track. ‘A ROOM FULL OF IDIOTS’ follows, an illustrative cut which showcases Ponce’s capable wielding of the drum machine; short blasts of spasmodic battering turn sharply to brittle snare hisses that imbue the song’s blistering assault with queasy bouts of disorientation, while the crushing heavy of ‘HEAD FILLED WITH WASPS’ reaches a dramatic peak of quasi-battle metal with its gothic keys and stirring crescendo.

The gargantuan metallic sheets that smother FALLOPIAN TUBE AMPLIFIER are twisted and crumpled to offer different textures among its hazardous front, Ponce bending and hammering certain songs into shape like a blacksmith exposing the many different ways industrial can be brandished. Doomy drum and bass haunts ‘FIBROUS MASS’ body horror surrealism and the synthpunk ratchets up on the coldwave chill that opens ‘ONE SEIZURE AFTER ANOTHER’, but it’s ‘LOW-HANGING FRUIT PUNCH’s shoegaze wash that particularly stands out, a thrillingly immersive clangour of caustic swirl that provides a welcome introspective respite among the record’s punishing din.

It turns out that the year and a half was well worth the wait. With FALLOPIAN TUBE AMPLIFIER, Badge Grabber shoves his way to the front of the noise punk crowd with an explosive full-length debut that fuses snotty lyricism with machine metal attack that also manages to plumb and mine new, creative and sonic cavities within the genre’s subterranean.