Alberto Cornero admits upfront that breaking down Ape Unit songs is a strange exercise. “The music we play is so fast and distorted,” he says, “that I guess it’s easier to feel and absorb the overall impact of it rather than focusing on what’s going on.”
He’s not wrong. The Cuneo, Italy quartet has been turning out frenzied grindcore/powerviolence since 2008 — two albums, four EPs, and a split deep — and their new EP “Sticks” runs ten tracks in just over ten minutes. Trying to analyze any individual moment is like trying to catch a wasp.
But Alberto did the work anyway, and the result is one of the more entertaining track-by-track commentaries you’ll read this year: drunk guys threatening the band before a show, surgical transplant poetry, a retired guitar player who now does stand-up comedy, and a running list of song titles they’ve been stockpiling for years and have only burned through half of.
The EP drops today, April 15, via a ten-label DIY coalition spanning Italy, Czech Republic, Japan, Belgium, and the US — Blood Factor Negative, Drinkin’ Beer In Bandana Records, Esagoya Records, Here And Now, Loner Cult, Nihilocus Records, Psycho Control Records, Rotten To The Core Records, The Fucking Clinica, and Vollmer Industries. Five hundred copies on black/red 7″ for Europe and the US, five hundred Japanese edition CDs with two bonus tracks.
“Sticks” is also the first record with the band’s new four-piece lineup — Mariano Somà on vocals, Umberto Salvetti on bass, Elia Dutto on drums, and Alberto on guitar — after the previous guitarist and drummer parted ways in 2024 to focus on other projects following a near-two-year hiatus. It was written in spring/summer 2025, recorded in four days at Dave Donvito’s Magma Recording Studio in Turin that October, and mastered by James Plotkin. Fast turnaround by human standards, basically geological time by grindcore ones.
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The artwork deserves its own mention before we get into the songs: the band modeled 3D action figures from random AI prompts, then printed them, painted them, and physically assembled them into a handmade diorama. The resulting image — people and animals feasting on junk food with sci-fi monsters looming behind them, framed as a nativity scene or last supper — captures the EP’s grotesque family album energy better than any PR copy could.
“We just kept the gross output of the AI as well as its mistakes and tried to make them real,” Alberto says. A 100% digital to 100% analog pipeline, intentionally.
Now, the songs:
“Biodegradable Youth Exchange” kicks off with a sample from an Italian film in which an obsessive-compulsive maths teacher screams the Italian word for “sticks” after scoring during an improvised football match with his class. The title of the EP, right there. It’s a front-loaded, in-your-face track — main riff is textbook grindcore, with a couple of mid-tempo breaks Alberto calls “really fun to play.” It was also the first song written with Elia behind the kit. Lyrically, it pulls from school memories, early 2000s crime news, and stories about au pair students. Don’t look for a through-line; there isn’t meant to be one.
“Toy Boy Division” is probably the nastiest piece on the record — Alberto flags it as “the most chaotic one of the whole lot,” and it started life during rehearsals with the old lineup. Getting it to work with four people required him to run a pitchshifter on his guitar to fake the two-guitar sound. The pun in the title is exactly what it looks like, and the lyrics follow a pro toy boy through the ups and downs of the gig.
“Diet Cong” is neither a soda reference nor a Vietnam War reference. “We just liked the way the title sounds,” Alberto says, which is as good a reason as any. It’s also the warmest-sounding track on the record — the most melodic guitar and bass lines of the whole EP, something Alberto describes as “really happy.” Happy being relative, of course.
“Plower Rangers” came out of a science article about unlikely surgical transplants, and the lyrics are what Alberto calls “the poetical outcome in rhymes” of whatever they found in that piece. He uses a modulator on the guitar here to thicken it into something alien, while Elia and Umberto hold the whole thing at maximum velocity.
“Old Style Garibuya” is a Japanese-edition bonus track and Alberto’s description of it is the shortest and most accurate thing in this entire document: “monkeys gibbering while randomly laying their hands on my chain of pedals.”
“Bohemian Rasputin” goes back to the era of tsars and dictators, to carnages and arrogant sovereigns ruling by the sword. Alberto tacks on a note at the end: “Oh damn, it looks just like nowadays, doesn’t it?” Yeah.
“Lieutenant Tennent’s” is, by Alberto’s account, the truest story on the EP. Before a show, a heavily drunk man approached the band at a bar, beat around the bush for a while with a beer in hand, and eventually told them he was going to kill them. “We believed him and hit the stage endowed with this new level of awareness,” Alberto says. The song tells the story from the threat-maker’s perspective. “We’ll never forget you, Lt. Tennent’s, no matter how many gallons of beer you popped, wherever you are now, whoever you have harassed ever since we met.”
“Rick Of Putrefaction” is a character study of the average metalhead — shopping at the supermarket with his mom, queuing at the post office, wearing slippers and a Cryptopsy shirt, “just waiting to burst out and dance to blastbeats when no one would expect it.” It’s a sequel to “Please Don’t Spell Sait-Tropez” from 2022’s “Filth,” which tracked a similar archetype on vacation at the seaside.
“The Vampire Dairies” is the other Japanese bonus track — short, packed with screams and growls and, in Alberto’s words, “whistleable guitar riffs.” It’s about milk-thirsty individuals and was specifically designed to land like “an average powerviolence song.” It does exactly that.
“Where The Smile Lives” closes the record and opens with what Alberto describes as “a bloated riff, as glorious as the subject of the song: the ability some people have to not make us laugh.” The mixing desk here runs something like Mr. Bungle blending into Morbid Angel with The Locust on top. The inspiration is wanna-be stand-up comedians — and, specifically, it’s dedicated to the shitty colleagues of Los, Ape Unit’s former guitarist who left the band in 2024 to pursue stand-up comedy full time. “We don’t care much about stand-up comedy, but he’s very very good at it and now he does it for a living,” Alberto says. “So, well done, bro. This song is for your shitty colleagues.”
The whole EP operates on the same principle the band has always worked by. Song titles come first — they have a running list that’s been growing for years, and they’ve only used about half of it. Riffs, lyrics, and structures get built around the title’s mood, whether that’s grotesque, sarcastic, or both. No political messaging, no scene posturing, no interest in being certified “true” by anyone.
“There’s plenty of good bands out there that do that with honesty, dedication and credibility,” Alberto says. “As for us: it’s just not our cup of tea.” The bass and guitar got their chops from The Jesus Lizard and Botch as much as from Napalm Death. The results tend toward punkish, sometimes naive, sometimes downright childish — but always unpredictable, and always under a minute.
“Sticks” is out now. The 7″ does not ship to the US, but the digital version does, and the Japanese CD is fair game everywhere.
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