ETERNAL STRUGGLE — Wartime Love Affair as reviewed By Mark J. Solid NYHC via Tel Aviv. "The music earns its fury"

 

ETERNAL STRUGGLE — Wartime Love Affair

(Demons Run Amok Entertainment, 2026)

There's no pretence here. The title tells you everything: Eternal Struggle, Tel Aviv's most relentless metallic hardcore outfit, recorded Wartime Love Affair during a period of intense local conflict, describing the sessions as a refuge created in a time of war and uncertainty. That weight is palpable throughout every second of it.

Produced once again by Brian "Mitts" Daniels — NYHC veteran known from Madball, Rag Men, and Skarhead — the record delivers a relentless hardcore and metal assault packed with crushing beatdowns, massive riffs, and sustained aggression. That production lineage matters. Mitts knows how to make a hardcore record sound like it could level a building without losing the groove that makes people move. The bass sits where it belongs — upfront, physical — and the drums have that particular NYHC clarity where every snare crack lands like it means something.

The tracklist reads like a manifesto in miniature: "Hate Is Not Enough," "Every Form of Violence," "All Against All," "Tonight We March," "The Lowest Kind." These aren't random titles. Eternal Struggle have always written with political intent, and on Wartime Love Affair the lyricism carries genuine stakes. You don't write a song called "Blood Into Water" or "TLV" as an aesthetic exercise when you're living through what this band lived through making it. The music earns its fury.

Where their 2021 debut Year of the Gun set the foundation with groove-ridden riffs and unflinching lyricism, this record pushes those limits further and harder. The mosh parts hit smarter — earned by the songs' internal logic rather than inserted for effect. The vocalist holds every track at the throat of something real, delivery fluctuating between the rolling aggression of Freddy Cricien and the street-level directness of Toby Morse without sounding like either. "Bronze" and "Bloodshot Eyes" are the standouts, both leaning into the Sepultura-via-NYHC fusion that separates great metallic hardcore from the merely loud.

Mandatory.

Run through fire to get your hands on this.

https://eternalstrugglehc.bandcamp.com/album/wartime-love-affair