Two guys from Barrie and Toronto, respectively, with over 25 years of shared history in Canadian punk, put out a record called “The Golem” on February 14. No band. No shows. No plans to play live. Just fifteen ugly tracks of negative hardcore, street punk, and crossover thrash soaked in gothic melancholy and the kind of humour you develop after decades of not dying.
Active Bastard is Ian Taylor on lyrics and vocals — formerly of old school hardcore outfit The Groggies — and Ionas von Zezschwitz on music, production, and visuals, who played in punk metal band Sardu. Matt Williams handles bass on a handful of tracks. That’s the whole operation.
“Don’t ask them to play a show,” reads the press kit. “That would mean going outside and interacting with other idiots.”
It’s a recording project by design. Ian puts it plainly: “There is a lot of freedom that comes with it just being a recording project.” He wants to get a full live band going again at some point — says he feels naked without one — but Active Bastard was never built for that. Ionas might get Sardu back up and running eventually, and the two did briefly consider taking this thing to stages, but it’s always only been the two of them. So here we are.
“The Golem” lurches between violent immediacy, harsh lo-fi production and unexpected melody across its 40-odd minutes. Songs veer into warped rock’n’roll shapes before snapping back into hardcore austerity. The stylistic range is wider than you’d expect — “Dare Not Laugh” is described as a Bo Diddley-inspired murder ballad parody, while the six-and-a-half-minute closer “Everything Could Be Wonderful” is a 20-riff method monologue. Between those poles sits everything from the 65-second gut-punch of “Why Am I Here?” to the drawn-out weight of “Wheels of Life” at nearly five minutes.
If you’re into Sheer Terror, The Templars, Cro-Mags, Leeway, or The Dead Boys, this sits in that neighbourhood — though filtered through something more private and less performative than any of those names suggest.
Ian’s lyrics balance existential dread with cutting, self-directed humour. Equal parts confession and indictment, as the band describes it. The record is obsessed with despair, absurdity, and the slow erosion of meaning — and it doesn’t dress any of that up. Ionas’s guitar work and arrangements draw from melancholic melody and metallic riffwork while staying rooted in classic punk economy. Ionas also wrote the lyrics and sang lead on “Hate Me Baby.”
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When asked to elaborate on the album’s themes, Ian wrote a poem rather than an explanation. “It’s as close to a synopsis of the undercurrents of the album’s lyrics that I could come up with,” he says. He calls it documentation.
“I put the gun to my head / I only have one bullet / The trigger can’t seem to pull it”
“Ask me for solutions / And I will say nooses”
“Salt in the wounds is the treatment / To prevent feeling good about achievement”
The album deals in personal despair, but Ian acknowledges a layer of societal commentary running underneath — alienation, the collapse of authenticity, progress as a lie told from the top down. “Only the lonely is all of human kind / Anything authentic is burned cause it binds.”
“I do not want to speak for Ionas who took care of all the music and one set of lyrics,” Ian adds, “but I think the music on this album really do fit in very well with the lyrics, so I suppose it’s a synopsis of that as well.”
Ionas, for their part, handled the visuals alongside the sound — album cover, band shot, logo, and a collage assembled from ancient public domain stock footage, the same material used to create expressionistic video loops for Spotify playback. “It’s really nice to work on a different kind of press presentation than a paint by numbers review or interview,” Ionas wrote.
Active Bastard is not a revival project, not a nostalgia act, and not a touring band in waiting. But it’s also not the last thing these two are planning. A follow-up will happen at some point — “it just might be a long time in coming.” Hardcore reduced to its most private function, as they put it. A ritual performed without witnesses. Gilded misery, bitter humour, and negative hardcore for those still alive for some reason.
