“Die Verge” opens “Mental Gymkhana” by throwing you straight into a noisy, splintered zone somewhere between punk rock, post-hardcore and pissed-off hardcore—there’s plenty of air and space in the room, but don’t expect post-rock breathing exercises—this is the debut EP from Leicester-based five-piece Value of Nothing, out physically on December 5 and digitally a day later via Grapes of Wrath Records.
The cassette version—clear red, limited to 50 copies—comes with a lyric zine the band designed themselves. Recorded at Liquidtone, the EP runs four tracks and just over twelve minutes, but it covers a lot of ground without drifting into abstraction or slogans-for-the-sake-of-it.
Value of Nothing formed in 2023, “in the loo at Duffy’s via a conversation about post hardcore,” as the story goes, and the music still carries that kind of unpolished directness. The band positions itself openly within DIY culture and left, queer, intersectional politics, but the songs themselves stay rooted in lived moments rather than theory. Anger is present, but so is clarity.
View this post on Instagram
The lead single “Die Verge” lays the groundwork. The band frame it around “the feelings of neurodivergence,” pulling directly from their own lives and the lives around them. You can hear that in how it’s built: the verse feels boxed in, almost twitchy, before dropping into a chorus that circles itself rather than opening up. That repetition mirrors what they describe as “masking compulsions and how all of that feels in real time.”
It holds its shape tightly—uneasy but never out of control. When they add, almost as an aside, “Oh, and it’s great to dance to,” it lands less as a punchline and more as a quiet truth: bodies still move, even under pressure.
“Crescent Road” looks outward, straight at the U.K. race riots of 2024, but from a position of distance. The band were in Leicester, watching their hometown of Middlesbrough unfold through TikTok clips, and that separation only sharpened the anger. What stayed with them wasn’t just the destruction, but what came after—people turning up the next day to clean the streets. That, they say, is the real picture of the Boro: “people of steel,” not “racists who are intolerant of migrants.”
The lyrics don’t waste time diagnosing racism or tracing its roots. The chorus makes that clear. “I don’t care why people are racist, they just need to stop,” they state flatly. That same refusal runs through the rest of the song, taking aim at borders and at governments that lean on anti-immigration rhetoric to scrape together votes. There’s no debate staged here, no attempt at balance—the line is drawn, and that’s where it stays.
“Dead Prescotts” folds back inwards, but there’s nothing gentle about it. It’s for people raised in places where silence was the rule—Catholic schools, growing up before social media gave anyone the words, or any situation where queerness had no space to exist out loud.
The band call out those assigned female at birth directly, people taught to “keep quiet, hate their bodies, and strive to please others.” The title feels deliberate, almost done-with-it, and the point isn’t softened for comfort. “Stay lapsed from all this nonsense,” they say, cutting past religion and straight into the wider systems that trained shame as a survival skill.
View this post on Instagram
The EP wraps up with “Dust,” written in October 2023, as Gaza was once again under siege. The moment it came from matters. The band talk about the song as something that simply had to be written, and that feeling carries into the live version, where they’ve seen it hit people on a more emotional level. It’s not treated as release for the sake of release, more like a shared recognition of what’s happening.
Looking at it from a couple of years on, they place solidarity with Palestine, Sudan, and Congo firmly inside the U.K. DIY space, pointing out that these struggles connect rather than sit in isolation. “All of us have a responsibility to act, however we can,” they say, leaving the how deliberately open.
“Mental Gymkhana” circles very real pressures—neurological, social, political—and doesn’t bother smoothing them out. Grapes of Wrath Records call the release a labour of love, from figuring out cassette dubbing to putting together a package they felt the songs deserved, but what stands out most is the restraint: nothing here is pushed harder than it needs to be.
It’s a debut that talks straight, keeps its feet on familiar ground even when the subject matter stretches far beyond it, and doesn’t feel the need to dress things up to make the point land.
