About two minutes into “Burn,” the second track on Black Eyes’ Hostile Design, Daniel Martin-McCormick yelps “Kill your shitty parents/let their blood flow free”: a signal that, in the two decades since the band last released new music, it has lost none of its anger. Born at the start of the century in the D.C. punk scene, Black Eyes—with two drummers, two bassists, two singers, and a guitar that sounded like Rowland S. Howard possessed by the ghost of Sonny Sharrock— upended the genre’s norms, melding no-wave noise and funk, percussive assault, and obtuse but guttural screeds against Bush-era America. By the time their second album, Cough, came out, a free-jazz influence had taken center stage, with songs that sounded like the work of a band ripping themselves to pieces only to reassemble them in new, misshapen ways. That the band’s last show happened before Cough even came out is unsurprising; a hurricane only holds together for so long.
So when Black Eyes reunited in 2023, it felt like a minor miracle. Hostile Design, in turn, is faced with an imposing question: How do you capture chaos in a bottle twice, years removed from the initial energy that fueled it? Though they’ve spent the past two years playing their older material on tour, Hostile Design doesn’t sound like an attempt to retread old ground; instead, in typical Black Eyes fashion, they attempt something new. Synthesizing the explosive tension and jazz squawk of their previous work while bringing their love of dub to the forefront, the band seems gleeful to stretch their songs into new forms and shapes; half of the album’s tracks are over six minutes long, luxuriating in echo and delay.
“Under the Waves” rides maybe the grooviest basslines the band has ever made, its flow not even disturbed by a noisy saxophone solo. Album closer “TomTom” is cavernous, the band triggering every reverberation that their instruments can muster, crafting a hypnotic sprawl haunted by Hugh McElroy’s constant chatting in Haitian Creole. Not that the band has lost all their energy. They build opener “Break a Leg” instrument by instrument, thumping bass piling atop frantic drums piling atop broken sax notes until it all explodes in the song’s final minute, Martin-McCormick and his guitar both letting out distorted screams, ripping his vocal chords to ribbons just like he did over 20 years ago.
What hasn’t shifted at all in the intervening years is the band’s anguish about and rage towards the politics of the moment. “Pestilence” is not only a call aganist genocide, but also an attack on the apathy of people who allow it to continue. “Burn”’s call to kill your parents is not for random shock value, but represents earnest anger towards the way older generations have discarded the futures of adolescents. The band sings in four different languages, emphasizing the global nature of the issues they confront. Black Eyes’ lyrics have always been more stream-of-consciousness impressions than didactic rants, and it can occasionally be tricky parsing out which current horror has struck their ire. Yet among the bedlam, some sentiments are unmistakable: shrieks about “the spilled blood of slaughtered children” or how “that girl just has a mission to make it down the hallway at night” make the band’s moral stances crystal clear.
Fans hoping Hostile Design would be a repeat of the same manic, bursting-apart intensity that defined Black Eyes’ earlier work will probably leave disappointed, though it’s hard to imagine any dedicated listener expecting Black Eyes to do the same thing twice. In the reunion world, punk albums feel risky: Can a band come within a mile of the energy, fury, and madness they crafted in their youth? And even if they can, does the result expose how paint-by-numbers the structures of the genre can be? But Black Eyes have once again shown how little they care about those structures, and decades later, it’s heartening to witness them recommit to exploring whatever unknown avenues their music takes them down, rather than just indulging nostalgia. Hostile Design, like its title implies, may hold little comfort, but it does offer catharsis: a reminder to not only look long at these modern horrors, but howl back at them.
