Uncompromising punk-metal from Charlotte, NC.  The sound of your sketchy uncle's Metallica and Bathory tapes played through a wrecked boombox.

Our take: One of the most exciting new labels in recent memory—Richmond’s Sex Fiend Abomination—brings us a short but brilliant 3-song demo by this punky metal band from Charlotte, North Carolina. This tape dropped digitally a couple of months ago, and from the moment I hit play I was enthralled. I mean, the band says it all when they describe themselves as “your sketchy uncle’s Metallica and Bathory tapes played through a wrecked boombox,” but that pithy description doesn’t get at how unique that combination is and how great System Maintains is at throwing the right ingredients into the cauldron to create this poisonous brew. Regarding the “broken boombox” part, the production here is a perfectly vintage-sounding, fuzzy scrawl akin to what contemporary punk bands who record on 4-track are producing… imagine the blown-out roar of Cicada or Shaved Ape, but metal. When the whole band plays at full intensity, it bleeds together into a wall of fuzz, but there’s enough room in the production for the key riffs and vocal lines to stand out, particularly since the songs are often arranged so those parts get highlighted as instrumental breaks. As for the songs and riffs themselves, they are fucking killer. I had an epiphany at the gym after listening to this tape like 5 times in a row and pondering how they can write such great riffs… then it hit me: the killer riff that starts “Final War,” the first song on the tape, is just a slightly reworked version of the intro to Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And then the riff they play immediately after that—which also totally shreds—I’m pretty sure I recognize from a D.R.I. song. Some people might worry about this, but not me. As I like to say, there are only 12 notes, and I don’t need every band to reinvent the wheel. Even if there is source material for some of these riffs, the way System Maintains absorbs them into their neck-deep vibe—and creating that vibe is, I think, the real standout strength of this demo—completely transforms them. This is just thrilling, and by the time its 5-minute runtime is up, I’m so stoked that the only thing I can think to do is play it again… and again, and again…