On a stark, black-and-white cover, a figure stands atop a massive, distorted head, holding a tattered flag against a sky streaked with smoke and clouds. The image, crafted by Jan Rosiek, frames Jad’s third album, “Odwet,” set for release on April 16, 2025.
Pre-orders open February 26, 2025, via jadpunk.pl, with the title track already streaming on Spotify and YouTube. The visual and sonic collision here isn’t subtle—it’s a gut punch, pulling you into the Warsaw-based band’s punk ethos, sharpened by Polish classics and American hardcore roots.
Jad, formed in 2017, has never shied from the grind—touring relentlessly since their start, they dropped their second album, Pain, in September 2022, expanding their reach into harder circuits.
“Odwet” continues that trajectory, but the title track, produced by Grzegorz Kucharski at Sound Park Studio, mixed by Kucharski, and mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege, digs deeper into the muck of human impulse. It’s slow, biting, and jagged, threading the raw d-beat hardcore pulse with the gritty underbelly of Polish punk, hitting the skull with precision.
The lyrics, blunt and unsparing, lay bare a cycle of destruction: (Rip the skin, / Gouge the eyes, / Find another body. / Take no prisoners, / Destroy the enemy – / It’s never enough.) The refrain hammers it home: (Revenge! / Or justice? / Retribution, violence! / Or human honesty?)
It’s a raw interrogation, not a sermon—Jad isn’t preaching morality but exposing its frayed edges. The repeated invocation of (Triumph of death, / Lust for war, / Validation) and (Triumph of death, / Domination, / Disappointment) paints a bleak portrait of cycles that feed on themselves, leaving only ash.
There’s no gloss here. The relatively slow burn—pounding, gnashing—mirrors the lyrics’ descent into violence as both necessity and futility. It’s not about catharsis but the weight of carrying that rage, the hollow victory of dominance that sours into disillusionment.
Jad are dragging you into the grit, letting the dissonance of revenge versus justice echo unanswered. The cover art— that looming head, the flag’s decay, the smoke—echoes this: a monument to ruin, standing on what’s already broken.
“Odwet” doesn’t offer redemption. It’s a mirror held up to the instinct to destroy, questioning whether the drive for retribution can ever be disentangled from its own violence. Jad’s third record, due in spring, doesn’t pull punches—it’s a stark, unyielding confrontation with the human cost of revenge, wrapped in the band’s signature punk bite.
