Stagnant, listless, and comfortable aren't adjectives that one would typically reach for to describe a hardcore punk album, but Thirdface's Do It With A Smile makes most others in their field sound downright one-dimensional by comparison. The debut full-length from this Nashville quartet is like an eight-year-old with ADHD on a 10-hour car ride: it never stops shifting, squirming, and veering into a completely different thought pattern mere moments after starting the previous one. Predictability can be a strength in hardcore. Teasing a mosh part with threatening chugs and an easily repeatable turn of phrase that fans can yell back as they pile on one another is good showpersonship. But Thirdface aren't interested in stringing listeners along and giving them the exact payoff their brains are hankering for. They'd rather pull a bait-and-switch every single time, and they're masters at it.
Every single moment on Do It With A Smile sounds meticulously planned. Every transition has a purpose, and every song has a conscious interaction with the one that follows it. Thirdface's sound is kind of hard to describe because it rubs shoulders with a lot of hardcore subgenres, but never commits to any of them for more than 15 seconds at a time. There are elements of fastcore and grindcore, for sure, but also brief moments of thrash and even inflections of slower, sludgier breeds. It's also not a hardcore album from top to bottom. The second half of "Ally" is a smoldering noise passage, while a song like "Villains!" has a raggedy post-punk hook in the middle before it barrel-rolls into powerviolence blasts.
Weirdly, the longest track on the album is titled "Interlude," and it's three minutes of a haunting clean guitar lick, miscellaneous vocal chirps, and a drum solo that sounds like it's being played from another room. As soon as it ends, it seamlessly slips into the menacing chugs of "No Hope," which of course goes through half-a-dozen tempo changes in its minute-and-a-half runtime. By the time it's over, it makes you wonder why all hardcore isn't this restless. © Eli Enis/Qobuz