Lay Waste are a grindcore band from the US and this is their debut EP.
I’m going to try to listen to more grindcore this year. It’s a genre I love, but has been a bit thin on the ground for my tastes for the last few years. With that in mind, I randomly came across Lay Waste on Bandcamp, so here we are with my first new grind listening experience of 2025.
So what do we have here then? Savage Rebellion consists of six tracks, with a total duration of 10 minutes. Yep, this is savage, deathgrind barbarity, and it hits the spot quite nicely.
Resist explodes into blasting intensity, and is over before you know it. It’s a lethal grinding short sharp shock of feral vocals and old-school riffs. Up next is the slightly longer Fuck Their Favor. Brutal and unforgiving, it has a metallic punk rumble that’s coupled with monstrous growls. It crushes.
Vaporizing Fascist Cowards is a sub-minute exercise in energetic heaviness that provides an instrumental hardcore beatdown between tracks. Following this is the second longest cut, The Admiral. This song shows what Lay Waste can do with a near-3-minute running time. The band slowly steamroller the opposition, before unleashing crusty punk-fuelled harsh aggression on the listener. I can imagine this destroying live.
Harsh Truth is a twisting deathgrind monstrosity that hits hard and with some meaty riffs. It reminds me of the 90s, and it’s thunderously good. Savage Rebellion ends with the longest song, Martyrs, which closes the EP with maniacal nastiness. It’s a piece of harsh brutality carved from granite and bestowed with a riff in the middle of it that’s sure to ignite mosh pits everywhere. The final minute plays us out with the sort of mountainous doom that’s flattening.
This is an enjoyable first release from Lay Waste. With a decent amount of variety and a punishing collection of riffs and speeds to play with, the band’s first forray into the grindcore playpen is a successful one. There’s a lot of raw potential glimmering on Savage Rebellion; Lay Waste are ones to keep an eye on in the future, methinks.
Wonderbox Metal 