Unsane
Sterilize

Hello "Sterilized".

I've been waiting for you for a while.
I was starting to think that in the end you wouldn't arrive anymore.
And the rule of "Better late than never" isn't exactly a guarantee.
Actually, it's better not to have illusions: besides, my shell is tough enough not to melt at the first cancerous riff.

Let me tell you right away that I want to listen to you without blinders and earmuffs. It doesn't matter what happened before.
I'm interested in understanding if you still have something to tell me.
Here and now.

Ah! Sorry if I call you You.
But by now we have known each other for a long time, perhaps even too long, we two.

To be precise, I know, appreciate, and have often been an enthusiastic spectator of - the skull chipped from repeatedly being hit on the brain is there to prove it - what has been brought by Your older siblings over the last 30 years, especially those who came quite some time before you.

Sure, even those chronologically closer to us are not to be thrown out with the bathwater like one carelessly does with soaking infants.

At this point, I don't think you are compelled to prove anything: even if you turned to mazurka, you must have had your reasons and I am no one to afford the luxury of criticizing you.

So go ahead, let's hit this Play button and hear what you have to tell me this time.

Track #1 - "Factory"
Wow!
But if you start with such a blow, then I get my hopes up... and I have to immediately take back all the nonsense I've said so far.

You welcome me with a fierce sound, compressed and agile. Almost epic-knightly.
Just the way I like it.

A thick layer of vitriolic guitars, saturated to an incredible degree, that ooze red & white blood cells from every part..
I'll need to elbow in with a rough sponge and Spic & Span after listening.

Here comes Chris's tormented voice trying (in vain) to take over: a fine pastiche of ordinary stories of smelly mush shouted, spat out, vomited in the face of those unfortunate enough to be in the way; here you'll need a good layer of exfoliating cream for tough and damaged skin, I guess.

The rhythmic-percussive clamor in the background is the well-known athletic, explosive, tumultuous, penetrating, and threatening Moloch; it's all a florilegium of edges, whistles, and metropolitan clangs in a sweet and sour noise-rock sauce.
Strangely, it all sounds very clear and clean, almost orderly: compliments to whoever organized the sounds.

If you're expecting a trembling trek-bai-trek, however, we're not there.
You go ahead, and then we'll sum it up.

The ingredients are those mentioned above for the entirety of the album: magma to which any admirer of the New York noise-trio should be accustomed by now. For those who have never heard them, there's always the Foo Faiters.

The greatness, if we want to call it that, of the Unsane lies precisely in the ability to "stir" and reiterate those seemingly repetitive and "simple" elements in a credible, intelligent, and (moderately) novel way: there isn't a single piece that mistakenly resembles (really many, by now) the ones already published.
Let's take "Aberration" or "Distance": the level of those fantastic guitar drills tearing the flesh of the poor unfortunate victim would be enough to ask for nothing more. The beauty is that, I reiterate, they don't sound like anything they've already done.

Three decades and more of career hardly go in vain for anyone and if we think about what many of their contemporaries and former mates have done over time (sometimes the physiological need to monetize, more often the depletion of the basin to draw from) there's reason to be satisfied once more.

So dear my "Sterilized", as often happened with your predecessors, you convinced me: well-beaten, entertained, and dragged along.
And for someone who doesn't do drugs, doesn't drink, doesn't search for the meaning of life by mutilating the epidermis with ignominious tattoos, it can go more than well this way.

Goodbye "Steri".

And thank you for once again making it this far.