Muscle Beach – “Pressure Kills” (audio) (premiere)

Denver hardcore trio Muscle Beach will be releasing their self-titled debut album on 4 December, and as you can hear on the new track “Pressure Kills”, they achieve a wickedly good balance of Fugazi’s discipline and Refused’s intensity.

“This song took us a while to write,” bassist Derek Arrieta tells PopMatters. “We couldn’t seem to settle on a second half that struck us as truly gnarly enough for it. We knew what the arrangement should be for it though; it had to be fast, unrelenting, and tense. So we decided to just let it build and build and build, until it came to a head. Lyrically, it made us write about the first thing that came to mind with such a stressful song: Stress. Everyone has it, we definitely f***ing have it. It’s just a stupid universal phenomenon that can strike anyone anywhere, and how potentially it can drive one to their own destruction. The end of the song is that outcome.”