With a name like that and an album cover featuring a vivisected human head, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Nequient play a form of knuckle-dragging brutal death. Instead, the Chicago four-piece specializes in a brand of chaotic, grinding metallic hardcore that recalls the frenetic math explosion of the early 2000s. Avarice is the band’s third full-length and promises a “unique synthesis of extreme metal and hardcore” to “blast listeners out of complacency with withering screeds against the malignant forces ravaging our world.” Despite some solid releases from last year, it’s been a while since new mathcore shook me to the bone and reminded me of modern existence’s inherent fragility. Nequient have the requisite political bile coursing through their veins—the same volatile fuel that powers the genre’s most unhinged eruptions—but is Avarice actually worth your time, or just another flailing heap of panic chords destined to suffocate beneath a pile of white-belt-era clichés?
On Avarice, Nequient paints an anarchic arras with a dizzying amount of stylistic touchstones. The band combines the unhinged frivolity of The Sawtooth Grin with the fast-paced stop/start violence of The HIRS Collective, and loads their tracks with riffs that actually stick, echoing early Converge at their most surgical. The twist? These songs breathe. Longer runtimes turn what could be scattershot spasms into fully realized compositions, bolstered by a wide palette of metallic textures. Blackened tremelos (“Christofascist Zombie Brigade”), demented odd-meter thrash gallops (“Brain Worms”), and sludged-out funeral dirges (“Splenetic And Moribund”) are all threaded together with mathy convulsions Nequient execute with unnerving precision. Throughout the record, the band moves between ideas at a dizzying pace, consistently impressing with bewildering moments of aural chaos.
More than just a collection of moments, the songs on Avarice are propelled by relentless pacing and tangible chemistry among the band members. Nequient’s secret sauce lies in the interplay between Patrick Conahan’s disorienting guitar cascades and drummer Chris Avgerin’s dextrous, fill-heavy style. Conahan glides between mosh-ready grind parts (“Mad King / Fool”), undulating, deathy descents (“Rintrah Roars”), and unsettling noise-rock lurches (“Siege Mentality”). Avergin follows along expertly, always mirroring the spastic guitarwork with tasty, intuitive drum parts that guide the ear and ground the anarchy. Aaron Roeming provides the low-end thunder and adds a purposeful heft that thickens the chunkier riffcraft while vocalist Jason Kolkey leads the charge, alternating between a sassy, vitriolic spew and full-bodied death growls while delivering caustic epithets about the horrors of modern life. Kolkey’s acerbic lyrics pull the whole disgusting package together, melding poetic death metal abstraction with punk’s immediacy and sharpening the record’s nihilistic aura into a potent weapon aimed at a broken system.
In fact, Nequient is almost too adept at channeling the noxious undercurrent of societal id, leaving precious little room to breathe across Avarice’s full-frontal assault. Longer tracks usually ease up on the throttle and inject variety with less frantic, slower sections, like with a menacing sludge-into-breakdown (“Rintrah Roars”), or a hazy, chordal comedown (“Stochastic Terror”). Still, I find myself wanting just a touch more space to find my bearings during full-album listens. Avarice is well-paced, and there are more than enough ideas to keep the 40-minute runtime interesting, but it’s missing one or two blissed-out melodic ideas1 or jaw-dropping displays of contrast to elevate it to the peak of the mathcore mountain. This doesn’t prevent Avarice from being a stunning display of technical aggression, but it does mean more than a few spins to decipher its labyrinthine heaviness.
Nequient really impressed me with this one. Avarice is a nerve-flayed, teeth-grinding listen that captures the low-grade panic and spiritual exhaustion of modern life with alarming precision. Rather than settling for dime-a-dozen mathcore spasms or rote metallic bludgeoning, the Chicago crew stitches together dissonance, groove, chaos, and razor-wire technicality into something far more purposeful. It’s punishing without being empty, intricate without disappearing up its own ass, and memorable enough to demand repeat spins. If you’re craving chaotic metallic extremity that does more than regurgitate the usual suspects, Nequient have your number.
Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Nefarious Industries
Websites: nequient.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/nequient.band
Releases Worldwide: April 24th, 2026
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