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When Shitlickers penned their 1982 classic, “Desperate Scream from the Heat,” it’s hard to imagine they weren’t predicting the arrival of Yellowcake four decades later. Following up 2022’s “Can You See The Future?”, Not For The Weak and Total Peace are proud to bring you Yellowcake’s newest offering, “A Fragmented Truth”. On this six-track slab, Yellowcake expands on their fusion of agile, crushing Swedish d-beat with blown-out textural crasher crust, adding in dashes of odd rhythms, grooving breakdowns, and experimenting with hypnotic repetition. Covering the amount of ground most bands do in an LP, “A Fragmented Truth” cements Yellowcake as a band a cut above the rest, standing among modern greats like Kriegshög, Impalers, and Herätys in their mastery of the genre.
Split release between Not for the Weak Records and Total Peace Records.
Our take: Phoenix, Arizona’s Yellowcake returns with their second 6-song EP, once again a split release with their hometown label Total Peace Records and east coast powerhouses Not for the Weak Records. As much as I loved Yellowcake’s first EP, Can You See the Future? (which we named Record of the Week in November 2023), when I saw the band play live I thought they were even better than the record, and I hoped their follow-up would reach the bar they set at that gig. Now that A Fragmented Truth has arrived, it exceeds all expectations. While very much the same band, Yellowcake takes a gnarlier turn on A Fragmented Truth, shifting the focus from the driving, fist-pumping rhythms of Can You See the Future? to something more jagged. The sound on A Fragmented Truth is slightly murkier and denser than the debut, and it’s altogether more punishing, de-emphasizing the agile stops and starts in favor of sheer, pummeling force. Yet, as the label’s description astutely notes, there’s a strong emphasis on textural variation here… frequently, Yellowcake is pounding away at what appears to be maximum intensity when a guitar track blindsides you with an attack from a frequency range that didn’t seem to exist a moment earlier. Similarly, the vocals sound even more dialed in here, taking the same approach as the first EP, but with a sound that’s both coarser and richer in tone. A must for fans of the noisiest, nastiest hardcore, A Fragmented Truth captures an already great band getting even better.