…Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, IRKED’s debut, The Grievance, blazes with their own particular (fire)brand of bruising garage punk with vocals howled by a twirling dervish of pure fury.
Whether it’s in the short, sharp jolt of sub-one-minute rager ‘Running’, or ‘Who Asked’s grim cycle of working and drinking, underlined by the chorus “Why does everybody want to fuck with me?”, the band are never far from spitting out a mouth full of bile.
At times it’s delivered in the form of snark, like in the cutting refrain on ‘Death Cult’ around personal responsibility towards global issues: “Keep up, you’re not doing enough.” Or, similarly, in the lines “Keep off the grass, stay out the sea, don’t piss in the pool, keep ‘em on a lead”…
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