Aside from the main reason I love Holy Grinder – the fact that they have probably one of the best band names I’ve ever encountered – they pretty much have everything I look for in grind nowadays. Cult of Extermination, their newest independently released album, encapsulates this perfect storm in thirteen brutal minutes. The vocals rip through the invigoratingly heavy mix just the right amount, the instrumentals are tight but never sound too polished, and the whole thing is shrouded in noise and grime yet every hit shakes me right to the bone. Holy Grinder have also somehow accomplished something that many of their contemporaries have not; they don’t take themselves too seriously, which is always a plus in any area of music, but they also take themselves seriously enough not to discredit their music as purely for shock value or awful humor. It’s not usually my modus operandi to talk about a band’s, for lack of a better word, “image” on equal footing with their music, because I usually don’t see it as being nearly as important, but it’s just so refreshing to encounter stuff in this genre without track names like “Fornicating in Pulverized Feces” or an album cover that depicts a similarly disgusting scene. That being said, Cult of Extermination is so pulverizingly awesome that I could probably look past all of that, but thankfully I don’t have to.