THE CHROME CRANKS unleash first album of all-new material in 15 years — Ain’t No Lies in Blood on Bang!/Thick Syrup Records

Since the 2009 reactivation of the classic 1990s lineup of the Chrome Cranks fans have been grinding their teeth for a new album of the influential New York band’s volatile, high-octane blasts. In these chokingly bleak, post-ironic times there simply aren’t any other acts out there like the Cranks, who play unapologetically confrontational, utterly incendiary rock ’n’ roll like they mean it with every poisoned pore. Like few bands before or since, the foursome—singer/guitarist Peter Aaron, guitarist William G. Weber, drummer Bob Bert, and bassist Jerry Teel—simultaneously embraces and destroys rock’s very traditions. But finally this soft, pain-deserving world has something new to choke on: Ain’t No Lies in Blood, the first album of new Chrome Cranks material since 1997, on Thick Syrup Records (CD) and Bang! Records (LP).

Cut and mixed in three blistering days with producer Kevin McMahon (Walkmen, Swans, Titus Andronicus) in Upstate New York, Ain’t No Lies in Blood is the eighth album in the Cranks’ nearly 25-year history—and their hardest, noisiest, heaviest, and nastiest by far. In keeping with the band’s earlier oeuvre, it’s another swirling hell of dark, raw, distorted blues-based squalls; hypnotic, labyrinthine detours through primordial swampland; and searing flashes of deep, torchy drama. This release, however, strips the outfit’s minimal, no-bullshit M.O. even farther down, to its most savage and primal essence. There’s the locomotive, open-wounded wail of “I’m Trash,” which flattens all in its path and hints at early ’80s hardcore angst, and “Rubber Rat,” a screaming, stomping mess of bony, cartilage-cracking fists. Three radically remade covers include an epic trawl through the Byrds’ “Lover of the Bayou,” and of course the Cranks’ trademark murky ’n’ moody side is present in all its black, jagged glory: Check the swaggering decadence of “Let it Ring” and “Star to Star.”