Headshrinker’s debut LP landed on November 10th through Shield Recordings, Loner Cult Records and Helheim Records — an 11-track, 23-minute run that comes off lean, crooked, and loud without pretending to be anything other than what it is.
The band frames it plainly: “mean vocals, chunky riffs, crunchy bass and punchy drums.” The record pulls together recent studio work on Side A and remastered demos and older cuts on Side B, tracked with August Corthouts, mixed by Sam Cardinaels and mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios, with artwork by Zwartjas. It feels like a document of where they’ve been and where they’re currently standing.
They come from the northern part of Belgium, moving inside a scene that stays alive because enough people insist on keeping the doors open — Antwerp Music City, JH Sojo in Leuven, and a handful of bars still committed to heavy shows.
The band describes it in a way that fits anyone who’s spent years in the same rooms: “We all pretty much grew up on hardcore, metal and punk. This means we’ve been spending 20 years within this scene and are lucky to know some of the pillars that hold it up.” One of those pillars is Niek from Mendville Bookings, who’s been “supporting Headshrinker from day one.” Some members are involved directly with Funhouse festival, which they call “a true celebration of underground hardcore and punk rock from Belgium and beyond.”
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That local context shapes the whole release. Headshrinker have been stacking supporting slots over the last three years for bands putting out their own records — Mitraille, Burning Kross, Parks, Lose, Bezette Stad (just featured on IDIOTEQ) and more.
They keep naming peers with the tone of people who watch the same stages from different angles: Lotus, Delinquency and Verval “doing their very own thing and kicking ass doing it,” plus The Priceduifkes, Becoming A.D. and Dad Magic pulling big crowds and delivering. It builds a picture of a region that isn’t just active but cross-wired, operating with the kind of familiarity that only comes from years of overlap.
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The band is hosting a release show on January 17th at JH Bouckenborgh in Merksem. They talk about the record less as a career move and more as another link in a long chain: “It’s exciting. Our (northern) Belgian scene is flourishing.” They bring up earlier pillars — the H8000 wave, True Colors, Justice, Rise & Fall, eurocore, beatdown — not in a nostalgic way but to insist that current bands are pushing the same energy forward.
Inside the LP insert, they wrote down every band, venue and promoter they could think of in their “little DIY-osphere,” hoping it keeps the spark moving. That’s the baseline of the record: a band who’ve played enough basements and release nights to know how a scene evolves when people show up for each other.
The tracklist — “Workin’ Man”, “Burden of Excess”, “Slog”, “Stone Age”, “Shock Doctrine”, “Tomb of Flesh”, “Sepulchre”, “The Vise”, “Erosion”, “I.T.V.”, “The Mirror” — moves like quick snapshots of that world, angular riffs, bass rumble, the occasional blast, “hardcore any way you put it, just straight forward punk for a world in turmoil.”
Headshrinker aren’t trying to sell anyone a myth. They just built a record inside the ecosystem that raised them, handed it to three labels rooted in the same territory, and folded their thanks back into the community that gave them momentum. It reads like a scene reporting on itself — steady, local, and still restless enough to keep going.
