HO99O9 - SKIN

Using the ingredients of hip hop, industrial and hardcore punk, New Jersey’s HO99O9 are here to create something truly ugly. This second album is a cacophony of hissing synths, thudding guitars and furious scream-raps drenched in EQ: harsh and guttural, with little space to breathe. In fact, with his usual distinctive stamp barely able to be felt, the notion that Travis Barker produced this seems absurd when the likes of the scuzzy ‘THE WORLD, THE FLESH, THE DEVIL’ and the snapping, snarling ‘LOWER THAN SCUM’ sound this gloriously nasty. While a record like this could sound overwrought and unpleasantly ultra-processed in the wrong artist’s hands, Yeti Bones and theOGM carry off the forcefulness of their sound with style, coming off as assured rather than trying. The only fault that could be levelled at ‘SKIN’ is its tendency to induce whiplash. ‘BITE MY FACE’ jerks from an icy cool industrial sound (featuring an excellent guest turn from Slipknot’s Corey Taylor) into a slow R&B bridge and back again in a confusing rather than creative fashion and ‘SKINHEAD’ throws so much paint at the canvas that the resulting art sounds muddled. That said, HO99O9 get it right far more frequently than not. This record remains incomparable to anything else being made right now.