You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, Terminal Cheesecake’s monstrous bellow, ‘What the hell was that beautiful racket?’, became the rallying cry for ne’er-do-wells and noiseniks stumbling punchdrunk between the head-caving, dub-infested likes of Godflesh, God and Oxbow.

TC were among the hardest of the bunch to get a handle on: a wilfully absurdist, multi-layered echo-chamber where the random thoughts festered and multiplied until songs keeled over from their own weight.

Now they’re back, as a live entity at least, with Neil Francis from Gnod on vocals, and they’re still a psychedelic journey to the end of your tether. Neil’s reverb-drenched chants (‘Hey Eugene… where you going with that bowl of chicken… and your… syringe’) are layered over riffs that act like coals on a conveyor belt to feed a wildfire furnace, as classics like Blowhound and Bladdersac are revisited like a bruised face in a hall of mirrors.

Having freelanced regularly for the Melody Maker and Kerrang!, and edited the extreme metal monthly, Terrorizer, for seven years, Jonathan is now the overseer of all the album and live reviews in Metal Hammer. Bemoans his obsolete superpower of being invisible to Routemaster bus conductors, finds men without sideburns slightly circumspect, and thinks songs that aren’t about Satan, swords or witches are a bit silly.