Absolute Power have put out "Stand Up and Be Counted", from Needs Must When The Devil Drives, which Time To Kill Records release on 6 November. It follows the title track out of the same record.
The band are the producer and singer Simon Efemey and Shane Embury of Napalm Death, which on paper reads like a grindcore man taking a holiday and in practice is nothing of the sort. The song is straight British heavy metal: defined guitar lines, a melodic thread running under them, and a chorus written to be shouted back.
Embury's explanation of the lyric is the part worth reading. "Lyrically, this song is about growing up in a small village in an area surrounded by other small villages, before the Internet and social media," he says. "Magazines and radio stations were my main sources for discovering hard rock and heavy metal. I always felt like an outcast, and heavy metal, followed later by punk, made it okay to feel that way."
"The excitement I felt as a kid when buying a new album or hearing a new track by one of my favourite bands was incredible," he goes on. "Those feelings drove me to become a musician." Forty years and one of the loudest bands in Britain later, the song he has written about it is a traditional heavy metal song, which is its own kind of honesty.