Cyanide Pills: Soundtrack To The New Cold War

Cyanide Pills: Soundtrack To The New Cold War

(Damaged Goods)

LP | CD | DL

Released 4th August

BUY HERE

Cyanide Pills return with album number four, another blast of hearts, ideals, and influences worn clearly on their tight power-punk sleeves.

My first introduction to Leeds-based Cyanide Pills was in a sweaty Spanish bar, their power-chord-fuelled punk-pop blasts pulling every thread of their musical heroes: The Clash, The Pistols, The Ramones, The Undertones. You can’t call it revival if it never went away. That night, the song that really stuck with me was the cracking Don’t Turn Right from their Still Bored album. Politicking in a simple call to the masses. Sometimes there’s no need to dress up your message under layers of metaphor and you need a shot that goes straight to the point, which is exactly what Cyanide Pills excel at. In the ten years since that, their second album, was released, the UK and much of Europe have headed down that path the band riled against. And so now, we have their fourth album: Soundtrack To The New Cold War. See? Sometimes you’ve just got to say what you see.

Through the album, the band take a look around their personal, political, and international landscape and throw all their concerns in the pot to stir up a punk-pop racket. Whether they’re taking potshots at climate change deniers on the cracking Dr Feelgood-meets The Hives-like Running Out Of Time, calling out the greed and lies of the ruling elite over the grooving pub-rock blues drive of Won’t Be Long, or turning their eye and spite on the Punk Rock Police on The Kids Can’t Be Trusted With Rock ‘n’ Roll, the band have zero qualms in letting you know exactly what’s on their minds.

That they choose to open their new album with The Kids Can’t Be Trusted… is a stroke of poke ’em in the eye genius as they decry the gatekeepers of their own scene who buy posters for £1,000 while the next generations walk on their so-called hallowed ground. “They like to think they own the past,” the band sing, before retorting “We’ll steal your Beatles and keep ripping off The Clash.” Hurl a plastic punk jibe and the band will bat it right back with a wink of an eye…and, on their single version, throw in a great cover version of The Kids’ Do You Wanna Know to boot.

When they steer their focus away from such topics, we get the wonderful powerpop gem of Day After Day, pure Raspberries meets Ramones, and the album closer, It’s Over, a shuffling doo-wop brush painting a gloss over their harmonies and licks. Early on we also get the twistingly riotous Low Budget Rock ‘n’ Roll to break from social and international armageddon warnings.

On Soundtrack To The New Cold War, Cyanide Pills flick the Vs at the gatekeepers, pull no punches and keep the Ramones-core punk-o-rama train rolling. No frills, no hidden meanings, just short, sharp blasts of a classic punk rock sound with their messages front and centre.

Cyanide Pills are on Facebook and Twitter.

Soundtrack To The New Cold War is available from Sister Ray.

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Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.

Nathan also presents From The Garage on Louder Than War Radio every Tuesday at 8pm. Tune in for an hour of fuzz-crunching garage rock ‘n’ roll and catch up on all shows on the From The Garage Mixcloud playlist.