Band:	Maggot Heart
Album:	Hunger
Style:	Hard rock
Release date:	September 29, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Scandinavian Hunger
02. Nil By Mouth
03. LBD
04. Archer
05. This Shadow
06. Looking Back At You
07. Concrete Soup
08. Parasite

With a perplexing cover that screams more sophisti-pop than anything metal related, Hunger nonetheless brings back some of the oddest hard rock music currently out there.

Well, "odd" is a bit of a strong word, as would any other adjectives like "weird" or "uncanny" that I could use to describe the sound that Maggot Heart do. More so it is a case of a band whose mix of sounds has just the right amounts of borrowed sounds from each genre that it sounds unique enough to not activate the listening complacency one feels when the music you listen to neatly falls into all the genre tropes you expect, but also not that weird or ambitious per se. For the most part, Maggot Heart just do really good hard rock, which isn't a surprise considering mainwoman Linnéa Olsson's stints in The Oath and Grave Pleasures/Beastmilk. It all lies in the nuances though.

It's no surprise that the one band that Maggot Heart did a split with were Okkultokrati, one whose take on punk also took it to some weird blackened and crusty places, and likewise Maggot Heart share a bit of that unusual vibe albeit without the extremity. Ironically, with all the genres I could namedrop, none which are metal come to mind immediately, with just straight-up traditional heavy metal being the closest thing. Instead the nuances here come from post-punk, deathrock, garage rock, and noise rock, each to varying degrees of quantity, and each acting to create that sense of slight oddity to separate Hunger from what one would expect from a hard rock album without taking the spot from the genre I'd first attach to this album.

There are some differences from Maggot Heart past. They still sound like The Stooges, but a lot less like the garage proto-punk The Stooges and more like at their weirdest and gothest The Stooges, which also coincides with a higher emphasis on the gothier sides of post-punk. The bass is still the main noise rock element, as well as the way the rhythm section flows being very reminiscent of some dissonant post-punk. The hard rock bits also have more hints of a very olden sense of melody, mostly through the increased use of horns, something that takes from the grandeur of old pop in "Archer" or a stronger sense of a chorus' catchiness in "Nil By Mouth". Some of the dissonance isn't that far off from fitting on a black metal record with the proper distortion, which is only fitting for an album that starts with a song called "Scandinavian Hunger".

Questionable cover aside, it's nice to hear Killing Joke, Sonic Youth, and Iggy Pop all seemingly acting as primary influences to an album that neatly blends those influences.