According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the infamous ‘Doomsday Clock’ used to measure the likelihood of global destruction is currently 100 seconds to midnight, the closest the hands have ever signalled Armageddon in its 75 year history. From tense American relations with Russia and China, deadly innovations in hypersonic missiles and anti-satellite weaponry, and Putin’s incendiary rhetoric warning off NATO intervention in Ukraine, the Cold War anxieties of nuclear holocaust feel less confined to the past with each escalation of political failure (plus a little climate catastrophe to further cement our dismal future).

Following two years of cryptic cyberpunk posts on Instagram transmitting broken collages of public information films, Ballardian celebrity disassembling, and Man’s inhumanity to Man, Swedish supergroup Ä.I.D.S. (Änti Ism Dogmatic Skepticism) have finally dropped their debut mini-LP long teased amid their faux-TV broadcasts. Comprised of members of Wolfbrigade, Anti Cimex, and In Solitude, Ä.I.D.S. have instilled their collective reputation for heavy crust punk with a toxic slick of Kite’s Christian Hutchinson Berg’s aggressive synths to deliver an explosion of “devastating zynth-slaughter” that sees them emitting an equally as noxious variant of electronic mayhem as New York gabberbots L.O.T.I.O.N. Multinational Corporation.

From the moment Charlie Claeson’s pummeling drums kick off the opening track ‘Annihilation of Hell’, the security level set on The Road to Nuclear Holocaust is at DEFCON 1 and never lets up. Bowelchurning guitar attack, bleak digital desecrations, and death rattle vocals are unremittingly unleashed amid the album’s panicked production, a bruising world akin to the sleeve of Killing Joke’s eponymous debut teetering on extinction. Third track ‘Afterworld Trash’ intensifies the hardcore thrash with thunderous solos and cold barren winds which end with a caustic explosion that segues into ‘Human Jawbone’, a far murkier submersion into the stagnant fetor of electronic metal with its squealing phasers and signals, but also points to a subtle narrative arc in the terse storms that interlude the tracks. ‘Blood on Blood’, the band’s coup de grâce, is an electrifying descent into radioactive crust sludge, a nuclear whirlpool of thrash metal replete with some of the most throat-shredding screams ever heard bound with a raw EBM bassline that weighs you down with hopelessness. The atmospheric chiller ‘Sadistic Gravity’ brings the album to a close, an intriguing change of pace that evokes a despondent wander through ruined rumination as one awaits the brilliant white-hot flash over mournful synth scrapes.

After The Road to Nuclear Holocaust‘s 17 minutes, you feel that each song and moment that’s passed has ushered the Doomsday Clock’s hands to tick ever closer to midnight, its industrial punk crater so great you look several times through its duration to check mushroom clouds haven’t seized the horizon. Awesome, merciless, and colossal, Ä.I.D.S.’ debut effort for La Vida Es Un Discos label is a ruined and gargantuan detonation of heavy-electro and synth-corroded, nuclear-twisted metal.