Album review: Rifle – Rifle

Remarkably or unfortunately, depending on how you view time’s ceaseless march onwards, it’s been nearly 20 years since Gallows released their debut album, Orchestra Of Wolves. And yet, despite two decades having passed, there have been precious few British punk bands that have gripped the jugular and captured the zeitgeist to bring the underground to the masses so successfully.

Step forward Rifle. Like Gallows, they hail from just outside London, a periphery from which they’ve steadily built their brand of bellaching. Turns out rather a lot pisses this five-piece off, with the objects of their ire – injustice, division, snobbery, disparity between classes – rendered via a mix of confrontational bite and pub rock bravado, kickstarted by a self-titled opening track that unnerves with its various time changes.

Elsewhere, vocalist Max Williams does a sterling job of navigating the listener through Rifle’s worldview, one that’s spit-flecked and peppered with profanity on highlights The Flag and Bastards. This is very much an album for our times, utterly restless in its execution, with 9 of the 12 tracks barely troubling the two-minute mark. It’s necessarily brisk in the age of reduced attention spans and increased surveillance to offer quick blasts of raucous rebellion.

There are other positive attributes: fellow punks The Chisel offered Rifle early support slots, so it’s only right in the interest of community building that it's been reciprocated by having their pals jump on Worthless, a track that proves anything but. So prepare to blast out those January cobwebs with a debut album locked and loaded with bangers.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: The Chats, Amyl And The Sniffers, IDLES

Rifle is released on 16 January via Year0001