Our take: The cassette label Stucco (and its many sub-labels like Impotent Fetus and Down South Tapes) has been bringing us some of the most creative and exciting music from the hardcore-adjacent underground for the past several years, and their latest from Texas’s Guiding Light is one of my favorite releases yet on what has become one of my favorite current labels. Guiding Light’s sound is difficult to pin down. Broadly, I’d put them in the tradition of forward-thinking, progressive hardcore bands like the early Meat Puppets and Saccharine Trust, but if you come to these five songs looking for an homage to a certain band or era, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, Guiding Light has firmly established their own voice, built around furious hardcore drumming, propulsive bass playing that isn’t afraid of melody, distant, mannered vocals that alternate between German (I think?) and English, and a brilliant guitarist who sounds like Johnny Marr trying to squeeze himself into an early 80s Midwest hardcore band. While the overall sound is definitely hardcore, it’s a brand of hardcore I’ve never heard before, and one that belongs entirely to Guiding Light. Even more impressive is the way Guiding Light explores their sound over these five tracks, showing how fertile their peculiar chemistry can be. While the opening track, “Sterb Doch,” leans into an artsy aggression that makes me think of Essential Logic, mellower moments in “Lost in Voices” and “Simmen” have a sun-bleached , Southwestern vibe that actually sounds a bit like the Meat Puppets. These adventurous songs—particularly with their rough, analog-sounding production—remind me of the creative explosion of UKDIY, but the more aggressive aspects are bound to alienate the modern iteration of that scene. On the other hand, Guiding Light is a fucking weird hardcore band; like the bands I mentioned at the top of this description, though their music sounds like hardcore, they do not feel like a hardcore band, but a band whose different paths intersect with hardcore’s extremes of tempo and volume. But for someone like me who loves the Raincoats and Mecht Mensch in equal measure, this tape is pure gold.