Intercourse Halo Castration Institute

Connecticut cuck-core quartet Intercourse is a band born of a slightly parallel but equally dystopian nightmare timeline, a timeline where Jesus Lizard has reunited to perform on the SnoCore tour with BoySetsFire, Boy Hits Car and Adema; where Joe Biden is lauded for not only his political acumen but also his comedic timing; and where the Lambgoat comment section is in fact filled with thoughtful, productive commentary. The abject misery found in heaping abundance on the band's latest opus seems to almost presage another Trump presidency, $9/gallon gasoline and a pandemic that will finally take the entire human race out of its ceaseless misery.

Despite Connecticut's unusually warm winter, a crime rate well below the national average, and its beautiful fall foliage and national parks, lead singer Tarek Ahmed (the only constant member since the band's 2016 debut, Everything Is Pornography When You've Got an Imagination) is still one resoundingly unhappy camper. Ahmed's unhappiness seems to run so bone deep he'd probably still be furious on a beachfront villa in Costa Rica on a 70 degree day; he yowls and wails his way through the album's pummeling 10 tracks like Tim Singer (Dead Guy/Kiss It Goodbye) faded off horse dewormer and room temperature Genesee Cream Ale that the bartender likely snuck him out of sympathy for his myriad travails.

Ahmed careens and caterwauls his way through discursive street corner ramblings (references to Joe Rogan, Seth Rogen, Charles Bukowski and Billy Smolinski abound) as the band, guitarists Sean Prior and Pete Stroczkowski, and drummer Caleb Porter, egg him on with their artless bludgeonings. Halo Castration Institute is likely what you'd get if Coalesce and Daughters had a beautiful (albeit slightly deformed and ill-behaved) baby boy ... and then they promptly tossed it in a dumpster behind an abandoned Sports Authority, only for it to be found and nursed back to health by the kindly chaps in Chat Pile.

"Where Losers Go to Die," the brutish "Stand By Me"-inspired opener, sets the tone for all the scuzzy bombast to come; closer "Kabristan," which clocks in at an unwieldy five minutes and feels more like an immolation than a dirge, invites Pete Kovalsky (Ether Coven/Remembering Never) into the fray, not so much to break the dour mood but to fan the flames of the the fury. Throughout it all the band seethes with a palpable contempt for it all, for the utter absurdity of the human experience, for working 9-5s at a fraction of a living wage, for playing sparsely attended basement shows to indifferent teenage TikTokers in Turnstile shirts, for crackpot conspiracism, for even bothering to get out of bed during the dying days of the human experience in a capitalist hellhole on a long-dead planet.

Bottom Line: Intercourse has admirably carved out a niche for themselves, granted it's a niche that absolutely no one asked for or needed, a niche for those hankering for a more misanthropic Flipper, or Unsane with the snark turned up to 12. This album, transgressive and terrifying like the two before it, is equally exhilarating and exhausting. It doesn't reward repeat listens so much as it requires them. By the end of it all, you've grown to like the abuse.