Ten rounds of three minutes come to thirty minutes. Thirty minutes, give or take the time it takes to spit out a gumshield, is how long Not Your Kingdom runs, and it is the tenth album. Somebody in the corner has been doing sums.
The New York hardcore crew who have been throwing hands under the same name since 1988, Madball, climbed back through the ropes on 24 July 2026 with Nuclear Blast working the corner and fourteen tracks in the kit bag, eight years after For the Cause, the longest stretch the band has ever spent between studio records, and they came out like a veteran who skips the stare down and walks straight in to crack ribs. No feeling out. No dancing. The bell has barely stopped ringing and the other fellow is already counting his teeth.
One corner has a new face in it. Jorge "Hoya Roc" Guerra, the band's longtime bassist, left in 2023, and this is the first record without him. His replacement, Paul Delaney, is no stranger off the street: he had filled in on bass many times over the years before he was made official, which is the hardcore equivalent of a sparring partner who turned up so often that somebody eventually gave him a locker. Freddy Cricien is still out front, Mike Gurnari is still on guitar, Mike Justian is still on drums, and the drummer has been handed a job nobody outside the gym saw coming.
This time we let MJ (Justian) loose. MJ was in the band but never really wrote riffs because he kind of felt it wasn't his place. So he kind of fell back. But he's kind of a secret weapon.Freddy Cricien, New Noise Magazine, 22 July 2026
A drummer let loose on the riffs is a heavyweight let loose on the speed bag, and the results are about as delicate. Cricien puts the writing down to himself and "The Mikes", with Delaney arriving towards the end, and the album sounds like a training camp where three men have hit the same pads for so long that nobody has to shout the combinations any more.
The combinations
"Tethered" opens the account the way a good jab does, setting the range rather than settling the argument: groove before speed, a chorus built for a floor full of bodies to throw back at the stage, and nothing wasted on ceremony. Then "Flammable" arrives, under a minute long, a short hook to the liver thrown from a distance nobody believed was in range, and it folds the whole room over at the waist before the song has finished introducing itself.
"Rebel Kids", the lead single, is the combination this band will be throwing from stages for years, catchy the way a right hand is catchy when it lands on the same spot four times running. "Stab Wounds" is where the gloves come off. The heaviest and most metallic thing on the record, it has the guitars reinforced with something closer to sheet steel than tape and the rhythm section, new bassist included, hammering the heavy bag until the stitching splits and the sand pours out across the canvas. It is the track to play to anyone worried about the line-up change. "IWI" is over in under half a minute, a flurry against the ropes, and "Chase a Dream" closes the fight still on its toes and still punching.
The voice is the reason any of it lands. Cricien shouts like a man who has had the same argument with the same landlord for decades and has finally been handed the microphone at the residents' meeting, and the target this time is everyone above the ceiling: the owners, the billionaires, whoever holds the keys to a building and mistakes that for owning the people inside it. The title is the whole argument. The production, loud and crisp and never buffed to a shine, keeps his mouth right up against the microphone, and the guitars are left with their knuckles showing.
The stool between rounds
Fourteen tracks in thirty minutes sounds lean until the interludes are counted. "Rebelude" turns up third, after only two songs, which is a fighter asking for the towel after the first exchange of the first round, and "Sunrise" arrives at the halfway mark, a second breather in a bout that was never long enough to need one. Neither is bad. Both are minutes a thirty minute record cannot spare, and on an album this compact every second the band spends not hitting something can be heard.
The other limit is the stance. Ten albums in, nobody should expect this band to switch to southpaw, and it does not. The palette is a shade wider than it used to be, and the feet are planted exactly where they were planted in 1988, so anyone who wanted album ten to rewrite the rules of New York hardcore has bought a ticket to the wrong fight. The band never pretends otherwise, which is a strength. It is also the ceiling on the score.
Ten albums in, the stance is the stance, and the punches still land.
This is a record for anyone who has stood at the back of a small room and felt the floor move under them, and for every younger crew that thinks the veterans exist to be retired. The old fighter came back after eight years out of the ring, lighter on his feet than he has any right to be, went the full ten rounds and won every one of them except the two he spent sitting on the stool. Skip it and you have missed a clinic from ringside.