And Jesus Piece use every weapon available to them, from choral moans to samples of death-row activist Mumia Abu-Jamal philosophizing. These are people who know heavy music, who understand how to make it sound huge and epic without losing any of its gut-crunch force. Where the band’s early work was relatively lo-fi, Only Self sounds grand and widescreen, with production from Weekend Nachos guitarist Andy Nelson and mastering from Nails/Integrity collaborator Brad Boatright. It is heavy, and it never lets up even in the brief moments when it quiets down. Only Self, the first Jesus Piece album, skimps out on absolutely none of what made their early EPs so intriguing. It ruled, and yet it was hard to see how it could be sustainable over the course of a full-length. They wrote riffs that could suffocate you with their immensity.

Their version of metal-infused beatdown hardcore was slow and brutal and deeply satisfying on some dark visceral level. Their records gave off an all-consuming, flattening sense of animosity, like they hated everything and everyone. Jesus Piece, from Philadelphia, have been building up a reputation for a few years through live shows and through singles and EPs.

Well, Jesus Piece figured some things out. To make a hardcore album work, you need to figure some things out. It’s a problem with a lot of solutions, but there’s a reason why many of today’s best hardcore albums are still only 15 or 20 minutes long. There have been dozens of classic hardcore albums, and yet the question of how to keep that music interesting - to keep the fury and speed and intensity going - over the course of a full album remains a real problem. Hardcore has grown in a million ways over the decades, but you could argue that it still works best in quick, compact sprays. Black Flag managed to build a whole independent touring circuit and go through three different singers by the time they settled down long enough to get into LP mode. Black Flag and Minor Threat were underground legends by the time they both released full-length albums. Bands wrote songs short enough that they could fit six or eight of them on one 7″, compressing their ideas into tiny and potent bursts of rage.

Hardcore, as originally conceived, was a singles genre.

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