UFZA: Traitor, Siyahkal, Grotto, Digül

TRAIDORA:
Traidora started as the solo project of Eva Leblanc, a Venezuelan-born trans woman immigrant living in the UK. She is a multi-disciplinary artist who finds time to play experimental music, collaborate with Eve Libertine of CRASS, and remain active in the local punk scene. In 2023, she released a seven-track demo, later issued as a 7”, featuring raw electronic-drums hardcore punk sung in Spanish, drawing from her personal experience as a Latin American trans-feminist living in an oppressive society. Traidora has played relentlessly both in the UK and abroad, with various line-ups, but always delivering uncompromising political hardcore punk to the stage, regardless of whether the audience is receptive or not.

Fast forward to 2025, with a steady line-up of four queer individuals, Traidora enters Bear Bite Horse Studios to record their first full-length album. The result—heavily influenced by the hardest side of Latin American punk—is thirteen blasts of sharp and explosive crude hardcore punk. Sonically, it sits somewhere between DROP DEAD, MASACRE 68, and LOS CRUDOS, with Eva singing in Spanish about morality, gender, borders, Palestine, and local Mapuche struggles, all infused with a strong trans-feminist immigrant message.

SIYAHKAL:
"Finally, Siyahkal delivers unto us their complete vision. "Days of Smoke and Ash" is the first full-length album from a band that has been dominating shows in Toronto for the better part of the past decade. The city's best-kept secret. And what better release to formally announce the relocation of the Static Shock Head Honcho than the excavation of the city's most overdue LP?

From the opening notes of "Your Head In My Arms," Siyahkal unleashes absolute, stomping psychedelic hardcore perversion. Self-recorded, the album sounds like a demon unleashed. Squalls of noise are smeared across a record of near-meditative, throbbing hardcore. It's an unrelenting, brutal album that would send any sane person running for the exits.

While the music itself is precise, intentional, and pounding, the vocal delivery and its lyrical subject matter provide a deeper meaning. This isn't just a record to crack skulls to; it's an album loaded with political subtext. How does an artist reconcile their own exile? How do they engage with the caricatures that western psychosocial dominance creates of their beautiful home? When their own survival is at stake, what is the true meaning of justice? SIYAHKAL manages to produce something indebted as much to the likes of DESTINO FINAL or MOBS as it is to the Persian culture that KG infuses into it.

And the sentiments expressed here are not just Iranian, or Venezuelan, or Palestinian. Siyahkal's "Days of Smoke and Ash" reflects the reality of the world as this era comes undone. They've manifested something universal and urgent that blurs the boundaries of hardcore punk. When power attempts to distort you, the only option is to distort back. Let the walls of Evin, of Guantanamo, of Al-Hol, of Ofer crumble at the sounds of Siyahkal.