Fourteen tracks. Just over twenty minutes. Chopping Block’s debut LP “Nowhere To Run” lands on Indecision Records with no patience.
The band finished recording “Seattle’s Hardcore” and immediately started writing again. No pause, no reset, and no long-distance reflections.
As bassist Matt puts it plainly: “We started writing this record literally the first practice after recording Seattle’s Hardcore. I think we wrote three songs, with three different primary songwriters, in the first two practice – Burning, Rumor Mill, and Big Man.” That momentum defines the record more than any concept ever could.
Their new record moves like a reckless sprint stitched to hardcore punk’s purest core — battle music in the most literal sense, the kind that pulls kids at the front of the room into something closer to hand-to-hand chaos than a pit — but don’t get it twisted, there’s a real spread of moods here too, flashes of melody and restraint slipping between the speed and anger, making the whole thing hit harder and feel strangely energizing rather than just loud.
“Nowhere To Run” is released as a 12” LP (catalog number IND202), pressed on 300 black and 200 yellow copies, with a private stream circulating ahead of the January 9 street date. It follows demos from 2019 and 2021 and the 2024 single-sided EP “Seattle’s Hardcore.” Obviously, the difference here isn’t a pivot; it’s compression. Shorter songs, tighter turns, less hesitation. Fourteen tracks move fast, but they don’t blur together, which is kind of refreshing given how often speed in hardcore gets used as an excuse to stop thinking about structure, tension, or when to let a part actually land before everything barrels forward again.
Guitarist Brent describes the intent without dressing it up: “It’s a bit cliche, but the thing that drove our writing was to create the music you wish your favorite bands wrote. Fast hardcore isn’t having it’s day in the sun in the way it maybe used to, so keeping the songs short, concise, and fast was our aim. Write a nifty catchy part and then move on you know?” That thinking shows up everywhere on the record. Parts arrive, do their job, and disappear. Nothing lingers for nostalgia’s sake.
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The opener “Big Man” is thirty-one seconds long and wastes none of it. Lyrically, it’s direct to the point of discomfort: “Threat of violence always implied / Threat of violence now realized / You’re a big man.”
The band didn’t plan it as an opener or a single, but it ended up framing the entire LP. Antonio’s explanation strips away any easy reading: “Big Man is not about toxic masculinity. It’s about all masculinity – about how masculinity is defined by violence.”
He goes further, cutting through the language people use to soften that reality. “When it’s framed as a positive, ‘real men protect the weak,’ it’s still about violence… defining others as being weak, and using physical or implied violence to ‘protect’ them.” There’s no attempt to redeem or rebrand the term. He’s clear that he doesn’t feel a need to reshape masculinity into something more comfortable for himself. That refusal gives the song its edge.
“Fuck Wrong,” one of the earliest tracks written, pushes the same urgency in a different direction. Musically, the band sees it as a cornerstone. Fast sections collide with stomp parts that carry a bit of swagger. Its working title, “Canucks,” came from drummer Alex watching Vancouver playoff games on his phone during practice. The final version is less playful.
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The lyrics are blunt, confrontational, and specific: “Simple minded fuck / Nearly brainless prick / When you talk / It makes me sick.” Antonio had the title long before the song took shape. He talks about wanting something that sounds odd out of context but makes sense once you’re inside the lyrics, referencing Dag Nasty’s “Can I Say.” The song went through multiple rewrites. Initially, it circled a familiar personal subject, something he’d written about before. He chose to step away from that pattern. “It’s been a negative cycle for me, and I wanted to reset,” he says. The final version lands on a coworker, an ex-cop, and the daily exhaustion of being trapped in unwanted conversations. The repetition of “Prove me wrong” doesn’t invite debate; it shuts it down.
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Not every track leans outward. “Look Within” slows things down just enough to let the lyrics breathe. Musically, it leans into a more melodic space, unintentionally echoing bands like Battery or Go It Alone. The words question a hardcore trope that’s been repeated for decades: betrayal narratives, backstabbing friends, endless grievances. The chorus turns the lens inward. “What if you did it to yourself?” Antonio describes it as an attempt to play with cliché without standing above it. He mentions thinking about the Egg Hunt line, “I swear to you this is the last time I write this song,” and asking himself how many times he’s circled the same theme. The result isn’t moralizing; it’s tired curiosity. If the same thing keeps happening, what stays the same?
That sense of self-examination carries into “Burn. Fade. Rise. Fall.” The final song written for the record almost didn’t make it. The band had a last practice scheduled the night before entering the studio. After ninety minutes, with everything feeling locked in, Matt brought in two new riffs. Twelve hours before recording, it felt reckless. They jammed anyway. The track stuck. Lyrically, it’s one of the more layered moments on the LP: “Driving empty roads, hiding from reality’s call / We burn and we fade and we rise and we fall.” Matt frames it as a reflection on dependency and survival. Playing music has been a constant through different life stages, something that keeps him afloat but also raises uncomfortable questions. Is it a lifeline or a crutch? The song doesn’t resolve that tension. It names it and moves on.
Elsewhere, the record keeps returning to distrust, frustration, and collapse without turning them into slogans. “Rumor Mill” captures the dull shock of learning something secondhand: “Now I’m hearing / What I shoulda heard from you.”
“Monsters” turns disappointment outward, aimed at figures who once seemed credible: “Wolf in sheep’s clothes / We’ve got rot in the floorboards.”
“Push You Away” deals with intimacy misfiring, two people needing opposite things at the same moment. “You needed comfort / I gave you space / I didn’t mean to push you away.” It’s one of the more human moments on the record, uncomfortable precisely because it’s ordinary.
The pacing never loosens for long. “Same Old Shit,” “Think You Know,” and “How Can I Be Sure” flash by, more like pressure points than full statements. Even the longest blast, “Regime Change,” stays under three minutes, channeling collective anger without drifting into abstraction. “Oppression and suffering / Intertwine and intersect,” Antonio shouts, keeping the focus on systems rather than individuals.
Drummer Alex talks about the writing process as a gradual expansion rather than a break from the past. “The part I enjoyed most of the writing process was trying new things as a band and pushing outside our comfort zone. This started when we were working on the last record, Seattle’s Hardcore, but we ramped it up for this one.” That experimentation doesn’t show up as genre-hopping. It’s more about structure, pacing, and when to pull back.
Antonio is particularly curious about how the less predictable songs will land live. “Rumor Mill and Burn.Fade.Rise.Fall are two that I’m hoping people will like and react to – they feel sonically risky to me in a way that’s exciting.” That risk feels measured. Nothing here abandons the band’s foundation. It just refuses to repeat it verbatim.
“Nowhere To Run” documents cycles—personal, social, scene-level—and leaves them unresolved. The record comes out January 9, 2026, deliberately missing the end-of-year rush.
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Chopping Block support the release with shows in Southern California alongside Berthold City and Ignite, followed by Pacific Northwest dates with Punitive Damage, Dry Socket, and Violencia.
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