Upchuck is a band with an unbelievable amount of potential. You might not believe it, but I went on a two-month hardcore diet this year and when I was ready to come back to the banquet to break my fast Upchuck's two-song 7" kicked me square in the teeth. The Atlanta band has been slowly honing their skill and gathering their strength since 2018. Beginning as a search and destroy mission by their guitarist Mikey, over the course of a year he located willing co-conspirators in the form of mononym compatriots, Hoff, Armando, Chris, and vocalist KT. Upchuck are hardcore, for lack of a better description, but a more accurate definition would be a punk band that goes hard as fuck! They're a muscular-sounding band that doesn't feel weighed down by their bulk. They're also heavy as a motherfucker. You'll want to consult a chiropractor to straighten out your spin after giving the gritty, burly gutter-winding crawl of their eponymous track a full rotation. The lightest aspect of their sound is KT's vocals, which have a certain amount of soulful fluidity to them, and aspect that hides a biting, tart, and dangerous grade- like a glass of OJ with a handful of sand a shard of broken glass sitting at the bottom. Upchuck take their sweet time developing each groove- carefully tending to them, heating them up like iron in a furnace, and letting them get white-hot before striking and decisively showering you in a blinding rain of sparks. The care they take with their rhythm smelting extends so far as to become a brooding drag of Obsessed-styled doom metal in the bridge of the otherwise swift and cutting "In Your Mind," transforming the track's latter half into a bluesy, downer-rock blowout. You can't suppress what Upchuck has welling up inside of them. All you can do is hope you aren't wearing anything that requires dry cleaning when they hit you with the dyspeptic spray of blood, bile, and adrenaline that rushes forth from their spleen.
