Eleven songs, and exactly one of them runs past four minutes. The shortest, "Speed Wizard", is finished in under three. Eight albums into twenty years, this is the record where Cancer Bats stopped explaining themselves and threw the padding in a skip, and the arithmetic of the tracklist is most of the verdict before a single riff arrives.
The Canadian four who have spent two decades feeding tour vans to the hardcore circuit put Give Me Dirt out on 7 August 2026 through their own Bat Skull Records, New Damage carrying it at home and Marshall everywhere else, eleven tracks cut by Kurt Ballou at God City and sung separately into Ian Romano's room at Camera Varda, four years and change after Psychic Jailbreak arrived on Dine Alone in April 2022.
It is also the first one with Jackson Landry on it. He has been on the road with the band since Scott Middleton left in 2021, and the first thing his guitar does here is refuse to behave: grit, nastiness, a tone that spends the whole record barely keeping its own feedback in the kennel. The board snaps on the concrete lip and the splinters stay in the mix. Ballou sanded none of it off, and there is not a soft edge left anywhere on the thing.
This is where the album splits a room. Take it one way and it is a hardcore record with the groove shoved to the front and the stoner and Southern rock character wound right down. Take it the other and it is the same sludge-rock this band has always made, only heavier than it has ever been. The hardcore reading is the better one. These songs are built for a floor of moving bodies and for nothing else, and the riffs are not laid out for anybody to sit inside and admire the tone.
"Stay Stuck" does the dirty work. Drums first, then a riff whose only job is to shift people sideways, at a tempo that suggests somebody left the coffee where the band could reach it. The title track is the one that carries the whole idea: guttural, dirty, nature poetry shouted over the top of it, the clearest statement of what the album is for. "Ocean Crash" breaks the mould, the longest thing here at four and a half minutes, paced on purpose, the vocal unusually clear by this band's standards. The case against it is that it could have been shoved a good deal further into heaviness, and that case loses: it is the only song here that earns its extra minute, and the range is what buys it.
Nothing here outstays its welcome, and two songs in the middle never earn theirs.
Liam Cormier told V13 in August that you could almost put the album on shuffle and it would still kick people's asses. Almost is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. The middle of the record sags, and it sags in one identifiable place. "Positive Grid" arrives with no distinguishing feature of its own and leaves without one, three minutes that could be swapped for any other three minutes in the catalogue without a single person noticing. "Long Tooth" sits right beside it and looks guilty by proximity. It is not. Brooklyn Doran's backing vocals sit behind Cormier there as a second colour rather than a guest slot, and they are the most interesting thing that happens on this album without a distortion pedal involved.
The guests are staff rather than decoration, which is rarer than it sounds. Nate Newton of Converge opens the record on "World Wild Fire Death Race". Chris Cresswell of The Flatliners turns "Bright Eyes of Gold" into one of the two or three best things here. Efrem Schulz of Death By Stereo closes the thing on "Fools Like You" with a chant behind him that works precisely because it does not sound like him, and a record that ends on its loudest gang vocal has understood its own job.
So: a band twenty years in, with an exhaust hanging off by one bracket, still making the next town on time and still arriving covered in mud. Two songs in the middle should have been left in the practice room, and the album is short enough that the gap is audible rather than survivable. Everything around them hits harder, cleaner and faster than anything this band has released since the line-up changed. It is not the record their genre will be measured against, and it was never going to be. It is the one that gets played loud in a van with the windows down, which is the only test this music has ever needed to pass.