Hardcore from Belgium.

Our take: This one-sided 12” (with a sick-looking Keith Caves drawing screen printed on the b-side) is the debut from Belgium’s Burning Kross. When I think of Belgian hardcore, my mind goes to Dead Stop, and that wouldn’t be an off-the-wall comparison for Burning Kross, whose music also owes a big debt to early 80s US hardcore and has a tough, slightly sludgy quality I associate with oi!-leaning hardcore bands like 86 Mentality and Negative Approach. While that’s a big component of Burning Kross’s sound, they’re not just that. In particular, I like the way they hang on their breakdowns for a long time, like on the track “Greenwood,” whose breakdown section takes on a hypnotic quality as the band squeezes the riff dry. The production is crisp but gritty, and the band sounds brutal and heavy, but also light on their feet. Interestingly, the lyrics for these six tracks tie the record together under one concept, all of them relating to the 1921 bombing of Greenwood, a black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. From what I understand, white Oklahomans tried to erase this neighborhood through a coordinated campaign of arson and bombing. The event was covered up and largely forgotten until a 2015 article in The Washington Post drew new attention to the story. It’s an unexpected lyrical focus for a hardcore punk band from Belgium, but their hearts are in the right place and I appreciate the history lesson, which adds some lyrical heft to Burning Kross’s punishing music.