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READY FOR DEATH
Pay With Your Face

Translation Loss (2025)
Rating: 8/10

Pay With Your Face is the second full-length album from Chicago, Illinois-based death thrashers Ready For Death. Housed in cover art illustrated by Ed Repka which depicts a droid soldier having his face ripped apart by ravenous rats, the combo bring a degree of fun to their concise thrash exercises, somehow reminding me of a goofy but gory low budget 80s movie. Maybe it’s song titles like ‘Spacebreeders’ and ‘Cannibal Cops’ or some of the sci-fi horror lyrics?

Most of the songs barely reach the three-minute mark, brief yet punctual workouts born from a punk ethos and an influence of Demolition Hammer and Power Trip. The mid-paced opener ‘Spacebreeders’ has such a throaty vocal tone from Artie White; a gravelled mix of hardcore and Obituary frontman John Tardy. The grooves the guitars churn out are usually defined with a dirty, mid-paced style, so in a sense haste and pace is not necessarily high on the agenda here. However, there is a persistent grinding of gears with the riffs, where bands such as Insect Warfare spring to mind along with dashes of grind.

At their most extreme you get hit by the likes of ‘Doomsday Everyday’, although after several plays of the album I’m constantly revisiting the squalid grooves of ‘God Send The Asteroid’, but there are some killer melodies on display throughout this opus. ‘Utopia Of War’ has a punky goth rock melody which I hummed for days afterwards, while the title track is simply bruising. However, listen closer and you’ll observe some clever little moves which show that Ready For Death are more than willing and able to step outside the box.

A mix of grindcore, hardcore punk, thrash and traces of death metal could easily result in a badly constructed mess, but as this album marches from the trenches one cannot help but feel the shards of shrapnel in the skin, and see the trails of human debris beneath the feet and tracks of scars across the faces of those who form the pit to celebrate such moshing madness.

‘Cannibal Cops’ is utterly brilliant with its gang chants and serrated axe work, and ‘Sewage Of The Divine’ has a Slayer-esque melody behind the confrontational bullet point chops, but such is the blend of aggressive styles that one cannot help but be bulldozed by this affair.

Pay With Your Face is a bit of an unexpected gem, but one which promises filth and fury in equal measure. So don’t miss out because those vocals strip paint.

Neil Arnold

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