CRIPPLE BASTARDS – Your photo on marble

vote
8.0

• Bands:
  CRIPPLE BASTARDS
• Duration: 00:13:07
• Available from: 12/06/2026
• Label:

• FOAD Records

Cripple Bastards means first of all coherence and intransigence stretched to the point. A tradition of sounds, words and images that has been renewed with lucid nihilism for almost forty years, yet managing to always remain faithful to itself and its gray aesthetic of a collapsing urban suburb.
In this context, within which the Asti team can now afford anything – no longer having to prove anything to anyone and no longer feeling the need to respect the 'regular' timing of the market – “Your photo on marble” arrives suddenly, like a stab inflicted by a hand left waiting in the shadows; a living wound, with irregular edges, and which bleeds profusely on a cemetery of alienation, misery and torment.

Eight years have passed since “La fine grows from inside”, but time – as mentioned – is not a factor to be taken into too much consideration in the sound universe of Giulio the Bastard and his companions: with this EP published by FOAD, the quartet reiterates the importance of speaking only when you actually have something to say, returning to the market in an excellent state of form and scoring, not surprisingly, one of the most successful coups of their recent career.
Six songs, for about a quarter of an hour of music, which start from familiar coordinates and then launch into a path never so articulated and detailed, which gives the impression of wanting to reconnect to the dynamism of “Nero in metastasis” (i.e. the album which until now could have been seen as the pinnacle of the project's ambition) further enhancing its unstable and derailing character; a narrow, condensed space, yet rich in variations and nuances, where Earache old school grind, Italian hardcore-punk and 80's thrash are fused in a systematically fresh and ingenious way, between more concise and straight to the point episodes (“Scarto del rimorso”, “Ai confines of what you can say”) and others which instead, on the edge of a tension that leads the nerves to break, see Ours experimenting with a series of liquid architectures and kinetic, capable of both tearing tissue and giving breath to the melodic-atmospheric component without diluting the general urgency and aggressiveness.
In this sense, episodes such as “The breath closes”, “Vendicativo” and – above all – the title track, which with its refrain already feels like a classic of the repertoire again, are exemplary in immortalizing the creativity at the basis of the writing process, underlining the innate propensity of the Cripple Bastards to never stop improving on an expressive and technical level and to take great care of the development of each riff, of each drum pattern, for a flow where the rawness always manages to marry with the definition (thanks to the notable production by Stefano Santi).

In short, given similar results, it is clear how this EP coincides with a far from negligible piece in the history of the Piedmontese group; a minor release only on paper, which once again raises the bar of a monumental career and then ends up among the highlights of this extreme 2026. Legends not by chance.