APE UNIT — Sticks album review by Mark J."Sticks earns its space not by reinventing anything but by being genuinely, unreservedly excellent at the thing it's attempting"

 APE UNIT — Sticks

(Blood Factor Negative / multi-label co-release, 2026)

Eight tracks. Ten minutes. Complete, utter, glorious carnage.

Cuneo's Ape Unit have been a reliable detonation device in the Italian underground for years, and Sticks — the latest in a run of releases that have consistently delivered exactly what the genre demands while consistently refusing to be boring about it — is the tightest, meanest, most satisfying shot they've fired. It arrives on a 7" co-released across a significant chunk of the underground network (Blood Factor Negative, Drinkin' Beer In Bandana, Here and Now, Loner Cult, Nihilocus, Psychocontrol, Rotten to the Core, The Fucking Clinica, Vollmer Industries), which tells you everything about the respect they've built and the distributed, collective infrastructure that keeps this corner of underground music alive.

The DNA is loud and proud: Terrorizer's machine-gun precision, Siege's unhinged velocity, early Napalm Death's political bile, and — crucially — the jittery, unpredictable dissonance of The Jesus Lizard and Arab on Radar. That last lineage is what lifts Ape Unit above the merely competent. The grinding powerviolence core is real and uncompromising, but the noisy, punkish, almost perverse melodic intelligence bleeding through the riffs gives Sticks a personality that most grind acts simply lack.

These songs are not just fast. They have shapes. They have jokes embedded in the violence — not irony as distancing mechanism, but the genuine dark humour of a band that understands their music is simultaneously a manifesto and a pratfall. 'Diet Cong' and the surrounding tracks move like the best moments of the SST catalogue accelerated past breaking point — hardcore's angular rhythm guitar logic shoved through a blender running at the wrong voltage.

The production is raw but never muddy. The performances are tight in the way that really fast music must be tight to be listenable — not clinical, but precise. The whole thing is over before you've fully registered it's begun, which is exactly the point. You press play again immediately. You'll do it a lot.

In a world awash in grind releases, Sticks earns its space not by reinventing anything but by being genuinely, unreservedly excellent at the thing it's attempting. Sometimes, ten minutes is exactly the correct amount of time for a band to make their case.

https://apeunit.bandcamp.com/album/sticks