Metalcatto
With a title that makes you think No Worth of Man might be dropping some gangster rap, their new album The Killing Streets arrives with more pent-up anger issues than a hypothetical ten-year-old alcoholic. As is often the case with such intense material, the quality wasn’t immediately apparent; it required a deep, attentive dive to unravel. That’s precisely what we’re here for: to mess around in the sonic chaos and, hopefully, find out what lies beneath the aggression.
So, The Killing Streets is a riff festival, to put it mildly. This is an album that exists primarily to hurl one thick, punishing guitar line after another at the unprepared listener. If Lamb of God and Gojira were somehow fused into a single, brutally efficient entity, this might very well be the result—a sound that is both short, focused, and laced with a kind of mathematical aggression. The riffs are so physically demanding in their conception that they could make a guitarist’s fretting hand cramp up just from listening.
I’ve described the overall sound as thicker than clay, but to be honest, what I enjoyed most were the vocals. It’s not that I could decipher every word—the enunciation sits firmly within the typical Death Metal growl spectrum—but they possess so much raw presence and gritty character that you almost feel compelled to snarl along. Doing so without proper vocal preparation, however, would send you straight to the otorhinolaryngologist (one of the longest words we’ve ever written at MER, and no, that’s not a new band name).
Now, however, it’s time to discuss the elements of The Killing Streets that are less overtly bombastic. It’s not that this album is playing it safe; given its stated goals of unrelenting heaviness, its focus is perfectly valid. Yet, it does feel somewhat restrained in an unexpected way—not in its intensity, but in its structural formula. The commitment to a consistent, pummeling aesthetic is so absolute that, at times, I struggled to distinguish one track from another. This is a double-edged sword: it’s good because nearly every song is a concentrated blast of energy, but it’s a potential drawback because the entire experience can blend into one relentless, monochromatic surge in a listener’s mind. Since we’re all a little broken here, that’s just something to be mentally prepared for.
Generally, I don’t gravitate toward Metal with this particular single-minded approach, but No Worth of Man possesses a distinct talent for channeling a certain Pantera-like edginess and confrontational attitude, even though the sonic palette is worlds apart from those legends. And yes, you may have noticed this review contains fewer jokes than usual. That’s because the work itself is surprisingly clean and serious in its execution—in much the same way your boss thinks they appear during an important meeting, right up until the moment they can’t get the PowerPoint to display because they have no idea how to connect the HDMI cable.
Label: Brutal Records
Release date: February 13, 2026
Website: https://brutalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-killing-streets
Country: UK
Score: 3.3/5.0
Metal Eclipse Reviews 