Seven years. That is how long the Long Island crew that taught the world what slam meant made you wait after Corrupting Influence, and when Settle All Scores finally landed through Maggot Stomp on 17 October 2025, eight songs and under half an hour of it, the first thing it did was kick the door off its hinges and drag the whole pit through the frame by the collar. No intro. No warm-up. You are in.
Internal Bleeding formed in 1991 and put out Voracious Contempt on Pavement in 1995, and the groove they hammered into New York death metal back then is the thing half the slam scene still runs on. This is their seventh album and their first for Maggot Stomp. Steve Worley sings, Chris Pervelis and Chris McCarthy play guitar, Ryan Giordano plays bass and Kyle Eddy drums. Kyle tracked his parts at Full Force Recording Studio on Long Island, the band produced it themselves, Taylor Young re-amped and mixed it at The Pit in Sunland, California, and Brad Boatright mastered it.
When COVID hit, my songwriting partner Chris McCarthy and I threw out an entire half-album worth of songs.
Chris Pervelis, Knotfest, 16 October 2025
That is a band that cares. And you can hear where the care went: into the sound. This is the heaviest-sounding record they have ever made, meatier than anything from the Unique Leader years, the guitars stacked like sides of beef on hooks in a cold room, the drums landing like a cleaver through bone onto a butcher's block. Young knows what this music is for. He mixed it for the floor, not for the headphones.
And the floor is the point. This is slam with a hardcore spine, groove first and speed second, riffs built for two hundred people moving in one direction. The vocals sit on the beat the way a hardcore frontman's do. The gang shouts come in where the fists go up. From across the street the drop tunings might pass for deathcore. Up close it is all shoulders.
"Intangible Pact" opens on odd-angled riffs and quick triplet runs, the band showing you they can still play before they start pounding. The title track is the one you will remember from the first spin, a funky slam groove that sinks in pitch and then slows right down into a chorus built for a whole room to shout.
Thirty minutes, eight songs, one direction: down, and into the pit.
"Prophet of Deceit" is the burly one, with a sludgy breakdown and Sherwood Webber of Skinless on guest vocals. "Enforced Compliance" throws in a heavy rock section and one of the record's rare solos, and those few bars of air are worth more than they look. "Crown of Insignificance", the first single, is the best song here: a slow stomp, two voices trading the weight, the kind of tempo that grinds a venue's wooden floor into sawdust one bar at a time.
Then there is the family reunion. Frank Rini, Jay Lowe and Joe Marchese, three men who have sung for this band over the years, all turn up as guests: Marchese on "Empire of Terror", Lowe on "Glorify the Oppressor", Rini on the closer "Deliberate Desecration" alongside Mikey Petroski of Never Ending Game. That closer is also the moodiest thing on the record, opening slow before it caves in, and a strong way out.
Here is the problem, and it is the only one. The songs sound alike. Not bad, alike. By the sixth track you know where the drop is coming before the drop knows it. The band is not trying to reinvent anything, and fair enough, they invented the thing in the first place. But a record this short should not feel this samey, and a couple of the middle tracks blur into one long beating. I have a rule for road playlists: if I cannot hum the riff in the van an hour later, it does not stay. Two of these would not stay.
So who is this for? Anyone who has ever stood at the back of a small club waiting for a breakdown and been rewarded. Anyone who wants to hear where slam came from, played by the people who started it, sounding better than they ever have. Start with "Crown of Insignificance" and the title track. If those two do nothing for you, nothing else here will, and that is the honest limit of a very heavy, very good, very familiar record.