Going Off – What Makes You Tick? (Recommendation)

Associations are a funny thing. They are an even funnier thing when the obscure associations you get are the most fitting way to describe something. Take the cover of Going Off‘s debut album What Makes You Tick?. There is a man with a bomb instead of a head. Anyone who has played PC around the beginning of the 2000s and loved action games will know Serious Sam. For those who don’t, it is a chaotic Ego-Shooter where our main character Sam Stone shoots aliens who attack the outer space colonies of earth.

One of the most iconic enemies of this game was a man with bombs instead of hands who constantly comes screaming at you in order to blow himself up together with you. Listening to What Makes You Tick? sometimes feels exactly like this.

The opener “More Love” comes screaming at you and grips you by the throat. Nearly every song on this album is a declaration to a world going down the drain. Everything that is loved about Hardcore can be found here: groove (“Flesh Prison“), breakdowns (nearly every song) and a singer that is vomiting his vile guts in front of the listener.

This record is made to be experienced in a sweat drenched room, with not much space to move and the stress of your work week needing to get off. What Makes You Tick? is a great debut and an exclamation mark in a world full of commas and full stops.