Celebrated all-star slaves to the blast, Lock Up always seem to reappear when the world needs a violent kick in the ass. Forged around a shared desire to grind people’s faces off, the band’s original line up of underground metal icons Shane Embury (bass), Nick Barker (drums) and the late, great Jesse Pintado (guitar), smashed their way to prominence with 1999’s explosive debut, Pleasures Pave Sewers: a furious and razor-sharp celebration of extreme ferocity and hardcore bite, with scabrous vocals from Hypocrisy’s Peter Tägtgren. From that moment, Lock Up became intermittent but undeniable standard bearers for the fast and the pummelling. 2002’s Hate Breeds Suffering showcased new frontman Tomas Lindberg (At The Gates) via another unstoppable tsunami of blastbeats and turbocharged death-grind, before 2005’s Play Fast Or Die – Live In Japan set captured the full Lock Up experience for skull-shattering posterity.
Regrouping after Pintado’s tragic death in 2006, Lock Up reawakened for a second streak of mad-eyed militancy on Necropolis Transparent in 2011, with guitarist Anton Reisenegger (Criminal/Brujeria) delivering the six-string face removal. One chunky hiatus later, the fourth Lock Up album, Demonization, emerged in 2017, showcasing new frontman Kevin Sharp (Brutal Truth/Venomous Concept) and a more brutal and untamed sound than ever before. Fast forward to 2021 and, somehow, Lock Up have mutated once again and become even more fearsome and destructive. Now armed with the insane percussive clout of new drummer Adam Jarvis (Misery Index/Scour), and vocals from Sharp /and/ a returning Tomas Lindberg, these bastions of the blast have spent lockdown months hammering out a new torrent of vicious hymns to the void: The Dregs Of Hades.
“When the Covid thing kicked in, we knew we weren’t going to be doing any shows for the foreseeable future. Anton got in touch, he’s always got millions of riffs, and he said he wanted to record another album. I’m proud how we managed to put it together. We had to record it in home studios. Anton is down in Chile, so it’s all been back and forth. But I think it might be the best Lock Up album. It’s pretty ferocious sounding!
Recorded in an assortment of studios around the world, The Dregs Of Hades noisily confirms that the Lock Up formula ain’t broke and requires no fixing. With Adam Jarvis stepping into Nick Barker’s shoes and delivering a jaw-dropping display of hyper-blasting precision, and the new twin-vocal attack of Sharp and Lindberg spitting deranged diatribes in warped harmony, the band’s new line-up have struck upon sublime chemistry at the first attempt.
“Nick wanted something different for himself at this point, and he’s gone on to form Borstal. He loves his New York hardcore so that’s great,” says Shane. “So we needed a drummer, but we’d just done a tour with Adam and Misery Index, and he was really keen to take over. Kevin Sharp was already doing vocals on the Demonization record, but I had the crazy idea of getting Tompa back in too, for the full double whammy. I even managed to squeeze in Pete (Tägtgren) on the chorus of the title track, because why the hell not?”
After the chilling, grotesque overture of instrumental intro Death Itself, Brother Of Sleep, the fifth Lock Up album explodes and keeps on exploding for a gruelling, sinew-wrenching 40 minutes of black-hearted speed-worship. By no means one-dimensional, the album takes occasional brain-mangling detours into dark experimentation, not least on towering closer Crucifixion Of Distorted Existence. But above all, The Dregs Of Hades is a devastating display of blasting belligerence, with a blazing, old school soul and obsidian filth under its fingernails.
“Anton’s written the majority of the music on the record and it sounds like Lock Up to me. It’s extremely fast. I wrote four of the songs but Anton is the star on this one.
Sound-wise, it stirs a kind of mid-‘80s vibe, that horrible, South American, heads-down Sarcófago attack, you know? That’s the spirit of Lock Up. If people are looking for something dynamic and different, they should probably look elsewhere!“
The sound of veteran brutality enthusiasts letting rip like there’s no tomorrow – and let’s face it, there might not be – The Dregs Of Hades is both a peerless addition to Lock Up’s recorded legacy and the starting point for a new era of celebratory sonic destruction. Catch them if you can. They’re fast as fuck.
“The album title’s been lying around for ages, and it basically just refers to us fucking misfits, ha ha! You’ve got Hades and then you’ve got the mire at the bottom, the swamp lands… the dregs of Hades, the worst of the worst! That’s Lock Up. It does what it says on the tin. We’re not reinventing the wheel. It’s a simple matter of ‘Let’s just do a few festivals here and there and just fucking blast!’”