Why do I love d-beat? D-beat is easy to like. Punk hardcore whatchamacallit? Call it Hive. Hive’s full-length album entitled Parasitic Twin takes your bare hand and stuffs it into a beehive. What a blast to listen to!
Metal or not, Hive’s Parasitic Twin is legit heavy and intense. The production values are outstanding for a band that love to obliterate the drumkit. The staccato sections sound demented. The heavier punk sections have got me laughing inside my head. There’s no better music on days when everything sucks unimaginably than intense d-beat whatchamacallit. There can’t be!
Intense, but dark and nuanced, Hive’s Parasitic Twin is all out war on genre typification of the worst kind. Let not thoust tread upon the waters of sameness, bands must be warned. Hive gets it. Metal, punk, d-beat, however way you mix it, it’s gotta incite a riot. This is the epitome of genre-bending heavy music.
On album opener, “Low Hanging Fruit of War,” the band wastes no time making a proper introduction of themselves. For the nine tracks that follow, they obliterate all of metal with heavy AF guitars, bass and drums. The vocals aren’t screechy and track nine “Common Ancestor” takes you back to the hunting grounds of early primitive man and utter, superlative violence! Track ten and album closer “Heaven’s Gutter” brings in the nice chord transitions and heavy mid-tempo moshpit moving tempos. There’s no end to the sheer pleasure of music on tap here. D-beat lovers have more to like here than just d-beat. Set your end-of-year lists on fire if you aren’t down with this! Welcome to the summation of weight and heaviness.

And it’s fun too. Sometimes the tempos slow down to a crawl, sounding like dark doom to me. It doesn’t bother me at all that the band slows down for tracks. The slow music is like the aftermath of a murder spree. Silence, dead bodies, blood everywhere!
Stream this now!
– Al Necro
Parasitic Twin is available now on Crown and Throne Ltd. For more information on Hive visit their Bandcamp page.