01. Frantic Disruption
02. Dead Of Night
03. Crushed
04. Krokodil
05. Pound Of Flesh
06. To The Hilt
07. Time And Tide
08. Sorcerer
09. For All The Wrong Reasons
10. Crisis
11. Western Apocalypse

It's titled Time And Tide on the account that you'll be given no time to breathe in the sea of crust punk madness, for which you'll simply drown as the tide drags you further in.

Phantom Corporation was formed in Germany in 2015 by members of BK 49, Weak Aside, Dew-Scented, and Eroded. Their style is primarily crust punk with death, grindcore, crossover thrash, and d-beat influences incorporated. Following several EPs, they released their full-length debut, Fallout, in 2023, an album which was praised for its unrelenting ferocity and endless supply of high-quality grooves. The debut certainly set their career off to a solid start, but now they hope to carry that momentum forward on their sophomore effort, Time And Tide.

Phantom Corporation are essentially a group of close friends who each decided to bring their musical expertise together and form this band, and their experience and musical chemistry clearly showed on their debut. Here on Time And Tide each musician once again performs in harmony, and not just with total aggression and an exceedingly high level of energy: there's a certain finesse behind the utter carnage that crust punk is more often associated with. Time And Tide very much continues from where the debut left off by once again merging a variety of elements such as melodeath, thrash, grind, and d-beat with their crust punk foundations, for which you'll hear intriguing resemblances to bands such as Slayer, At The Gates, Impaled Nazarene, and Napalm Death. The result here is an even dirtier and groovier offering than the album previous that's unrelentingly ferocious throughout its 42-minute run-time.

The rhythm is mostly driven at a rapid speed as Bass-T's heavy, rumbling, low-toned bass and Mücke's frantic d-beats, blast-beats, and stylish patterns work relentlessly in sync. The guitar duo of Philipp and Arne unleashes a devastating variety of riffs and leads, from distorted power chords and crushing chugs to quality punkish grooves and breakneck shredding solos. Vocalist Leif then aggressively snarls and growls like an untamed, savage, bloodthirsty beast, and there's no pulling away from those gnashing fangs from the very instant he bellows out. Each song flows in a relentless fashion from one to the next, and at such a rapid rate that it's hard sometimes to tell when a song ends and another begins. It's created this way to not allow yourself time to take a breather. There are a few moderate-tempo sections that occur, but these sections simply ease the foot off the pedal temporarily, just enough for the album to gather enough momentum before the pedal slams right back down to the ground so the album can resume its rampaging path of total crust punk destruction.

We often associate crust punk with the genre that first emerged in the '80s through bands such as Discharge and Extreme Noise Terror, or as a genre generally known for combining blackened elements with the horrid attitude of punk rock, but Phantom Corporation are going about developing a distinctive style of their own. They don't follow the typical route associated with crust punk but rather delve into death, thrash, grind, and whatever else they can incorporate. I'd say they were just finding their feet with their debut but they've now managed to set their mark with Time And Tide, and time will tell as to whether they can progress to another level from here.

Performance:	8
Songwriting:	7
Originality:	7
Production:	7