Skip to content
Three years after their vinyl debut, 2020's Echoes of Life, comes Destruct’s second album, Cries the Mocking Mother Nature. The band continues to pay respects to their raw hardcore influences, with greater emphasis on 80’s Swedish mangel and brutal late 90’s Japanese crust hardcore, in addition to the always present nod to British pioneers Disaster and Doom. Twelve tracks in 24 minutes. Cover art by master punk artist Joe B. Each copy of the first pressing is accompanied by a 22x33 inch fold out poster graciously illustrated by Japanese hardcore punk legend, CROW.
Our take: Cries the Mocking Mother Nature is the long-percolating second album from Richmond’s Destruct. It’s no secret we’re enamored of Destruct here at Sorry State. A big part of that is that we get to see them live all the time, and Destruct is a punishing live band. Both live and on their records, Destruct live is an all-out assault whose fury, like the M.C. Escher staircase, seems to ascend infinitely. Destruct is just so fucking powerful, striving for and often attaining the same intensity that marked the Japanese hardcore punk bands that have shaped their sound. I’ve always heard four key ingredients in Destruct’s stew: Bastard, Disclose, Gauze, and Crow. They don’t emulate those bands so much as synthesize them, similar to how those bands synthesized—maybe even purified—their own influences. Also like those Japanese bands, Destruct is exacting in their execution. Everything about them is considered and calculated… it’s like they’ve combed through every aspect of their songs, their aesthetic, and their very existence as a band and maximized its power and intensity. Cries the Mocking Mother Nature is the result, and it’s one of the most coherent, powerful, and unrelenting statements of hardcore punk 2023 has to offer.
Our take: Cries the Mocking Mother Nature is the long-percolating second album from Richmond’s Destruct. It’s no secret we’re enamored of Destruct here at Sorry State. A big part of that is that we get to see them live all the time, and Destruct is a punishing live band. Both live and on their records, Destruct live is an all-out assault whose fury, like the M.C. Escher staircase, seems to ascend infinitely. Destruct is just so fucking powerful, striving for and often attaining the same intensity that marked the Japanese hardcore punk bands that have shaped their sound. I’ve always heard four key ingredients in Destruct’s stew: Bastard, Disclose, Gauze, and Crow. They don’t emulate those bands so much as synthesize them, similar to how those bands synthesized—maybe even purified—their own influences. Also like those Japanese bands, Destruct is exacting in their execution. Everything about them is considered and calculated… it’s like they’ve combed through every aspect of their songs, their aesthetic, and their very existence as a band and maximized its power and intensity. Cries the Mocking Mother Nature is the result, and it’s one of the most coherent, powerful, and unrelenting statements of hardcore punk 2023 has to offer.