KOYO レコード& CD

Review: Double standards, unreliability, flakiness, and the bittersweet nature of nostalgia all play their part in Koyo's confident and rightly acclaimed debut album. The Long Island hardcore-punk set picked up nods from all the right places when they first bestowed this on the world in 2023, and listening back almost 12 months on the impact hasn't really waned. Bursting from the starting blocks as they evidently meant to go on, even the record's first sort-of-downtime, 'Flatline Afternoon', doesn't really let the intensity slip, with similarly half-time numbers such as 'Message Like A Bomb' making it clear Koyo seem incapable of making bland or uneventful music. Perhaps not cutting out any new paths for the genre as such, nevertheless the precision accuracy of what's here bears the mark of greats in the making.