Hey knuckle draggers and chain swingers! Looking to add some dynamite to your pogo stick? Look no further!! Enzyme’s Golden Dystopian Age LP is here! 4 years since Howling Minds LP, Enzyme’s 2nd offering bends all odds and pushes the band’s brand of noise punk to a new limit. Lots to process about this record, from the hyperactive drumming, catchy rhythm backbone by the bass, 1000 pedal stomp buzz saw noise/psychedelic soundscapes guitars, discordant terminator vocals that sound like they been recorded through a cheap boom box, cameo vocals from Hardcore Victim CEO / Phantasm vox Bernie, to the more noise / beats provided by hard techno unit Nerve AKA Joshua Wells makes for one perfect storm that these noise bent fuckers have managed to harness. 3 years to make, this record sounds and reads like a reflection of life living through the tightly sanctioned lockdowns, a state of uncertainty, helplessness, anxiety and fear, geographical and imposed isolation, natural disasters and civil unrest in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia. 8 relentless noise punk tracks for the new hell we live in.

Golden Dystopian Age showcases Enzyme’s never ending one sided romance with punk legends Confuse, Chaos U.K and Disorder but also exploring other influences like Anarcho punk, space rock, psychedelia, metal and gabber. Blasphemy! Is this punk future? It’s as ugly as the world Enzyme sees. It’s the Golden Dystopian Age.


Our take: Surely every punk with a social media account knows Enzyme just completed a triumphant North American tour. These Aussies are so damn cool-looking and photogenic that the algorithm loves them, and I feel like I saw classic-looking photos of their live antics daily while they were here. While the attention on Enzyme’s live show is deserved (they slayed at the date I caught in Richmond), I haven’t seen as much chatter about how fucking great their new album is. Seriously, Golden Dystopian Age is a face-melter, intense yet mind-bending, and with hooks! Enzyme’s sound takes a lot from the Confuse / Gai family tree, and that style can go either way for me… bands who add little to the formula are a dime a dozen, but there are bands like Lebenden Toten and D-Clone who make that sound the foundation of some of the most innovatively warped music in the entire underground. Ezyme belongs in the latter category… across Golden Dystopian Age you’ll not only hear a wide range of different distortion tones and textures, you’ll also get disco beats, electronic sequencer rhythms, and epic intros and outros. You never know what crazy sound will come at you next, and the wildness of it is so over the top I grin with delight when I listen. For all its progressiveness, though, it never feels like Enzyme is forcing you to listen to “experiments…” the songs are packed with hooks, with memorable moments like the wild drum pattern in “Chewing the Fat,” the infusion of disco in “Masquerade,” and the chanted choruses, which feel as firmly lodged in my brain as classic Steve Ignorant diatribes. Golden Dystopian Age is highly compressed, jamming so many ideas into its brief fourteen minutes it feels like it’s bursting with creativity. Its brevity also makes it extremely replayable, which only makes the hooks sink in deeper. Far more than just a souvenir from a memorable tour, Golden Dystopian Age should go down as one of punk’s most exciting triumphs of 2023.