Kill The President

There are records that arrive politely, introduce themselves, shake your hand and wait patiently for you to decide whether you like them. Then there are records that kick the front door off its hinges, throw the furniture into the street and demand to know why the fuck you're still sitting down. Kill The President!’s Face The Tide belongs firmly in the second category, arriving from Valencia with 27 minutes of melodic hardcore fury, skate-punk velocity, huge guitars and the sort of righteous anger that sounds considerably better through a large amplifier than it does through a laptop speaker.

Released on 2 October through Lockjaw Records, Face The Tide is the latest full-length from a band that has been putting in the miles since their debut Citizens, travelling across Europe and the UK and sharing stages with the likes of Less Than Jake, Strung Out, Belvedere and GBH. Their 2022 album Aftermath established that Kill The President! were no longer simply another Valencia punk band making a lot of noise in small rooms; Face The Tide takes that experience and sharpens it considerably. Lockjaw calls it melody, rage and adrenaline, which sounds suspiciously like someone has been spying on the band's rehearsal room.

The opening track, “Hollow Mirrors,” wastes absolutely no time establishing the rules. Guitars come flying out of the speakers, the rhythm section gets its boots firmly planted and the whole thing hurtles forward with the kind of momentum that makes you instinctively reach for the volume control. This is melodic hardcore with the brakes removed, but the important word remains melodic. Kill The President! aren't interested in turning speed into a competition; they understand that the fastest route into somebody's head is often a chorus you can remember after the first listen.

That balance between aggression and melody is where Face The Tide really earns its keep. You can hear the band's influences — Strung Out, Belvedere, Propagandhi, Strike Anywhere and No Fun At All are all obvious reference points — but the Valencia connection matters because Kill The President! have their own sense of urgency. There is Mediterranean heat in the delivery, European hardcore muscle in the execution and enough punk-rock tunefulness to stop the whole thing becoming a 27-minute exercise in shouting at the walls.

“The Lighthouse” is arguably the record's most immediate statement, and it is easy to understand why it was chosen as the album's calling card. The song has the propulsion of a band racing downhill with a stolen shopping trolley while somehow maintaining enough control to nail every corner, with guitars that slash and soar rather than simply bludgeon. It is the sort of track that makes perfect sense when you imagine it being played in a packed club, with the crowd three deep against the barrier and half the room shouting the chorus back at the stage.

Then comes “Unspoken,” which has already existed in the Kill The President! universe as a 2024 track and now finds its place within the album's wider landscape. Its lyrical anger is aimed squarely at social injustice, environmental destruction and the hypocrisy of people who watch the world burn while pretending they can't smell the smoke. The band's Bandcamp version makes the subject matter explicit, but what matters musically is that they don't turn the message into a sermon. The rage is carried by the music itself, with the guitars and rhythm section providing the forward motion while the vocals deliver the punch.

The album then pulls a neat little trick with “Reminiscence,” a 64-second instrumental that gives you just enough breathing space before “Remembrance” arrives and kicks the door in again. At a time when albums routinely seem to arrive carrying enough material for a small box set, the discipline here is refreshing. Ten tracks, 27 minutes, no unnecessary padding and no temptation to turn a punk record into a conceptual fucking thesis. The running times tell the story: most tracks are between two and three-and-a-half minutes, with “Unspoken” and “Papers” stretching beyond that without losing the album's momentum.

“Liger Society” keeps the pressure high before “Start Moving Forward” brings Japanese melodic-hardcore band waterweed into the picture. The collaboration makes sense because the song embodies the album's central philosophy: don't stand around waiting for somebody else to fix the mess, because the world isn't going to send a rescue team. Keep moving, keep fighting and keep pushing through whatever is coming at you. At just over two minutes, the song doesn't hang around long enough for anybody to overthink it, which is probably exactly the point.

By the time “Painted In Gold” arrives, the record has settled into a beautifully brutal rhythm. There is nothing particularly complicated about the basic proposition here, and that is one of the album's strengths. Kill The President! know what they are good at, and instead of disappearing down some unnecessary musical rabbit hole, they concentrate on doing it extremely well. The guitars are sharp, the drums have genuine physical weight and the melodies keep appearing just when the record needs them.

“Papers” is another reminder that this is a band interested in more than simply making a room bounce. Kill The President! have always had social and environmental issues running through their work, and Face The Tide continues that tradition without becoming an album you need to read a political essay alongside. The songs have something to say, but they also have riffs, hooks and enough horsepower to make you forget that you're being lectured until you suddenly realise you're singing along.

That is the trick. The message gets in because the music gets you first. The title track closes the album with the final piece of the puzzle, and Face The Tide suddenly makes perfect sense as a complete statement rather than simply a collection of songs. The tide is the pressure, the noise, the environmental and social chaos, the constant sense that everything is getting slightly more fucked than it was yesterday. Kill The President's response isn't despair, because despair is boring and ultimately useless. Their answer is movement, resistance, community and the stubborn belief that you can still push back even when the water is already around your knees.

That makes Face The Tide a surprisingly positive record considering how much anger it contains. There is a huge difference between being angry because you've given up and being angry because you still care. Kill The President! clearly belong in the second camp. Their frustration comes from somewhere much more useful than nihilism, and the music reflects that. Even when the lyrics are dealing with some fairly bleak territory, the songs themselves feel alive, physical and optimistic in that peculiarly punk-rock way where optimism means picking yourself up, turning the amplifier back on and having another fucking go.

It is also a record that feels built for Valencia's live circuit. Kill The President! have spent years developing their sound in clubs and on European festival stages, including Groezrock, Manchester Punk Fest, Punk Rock Holiday and Brakrock, and that experience is all over Face The Tide. This isn't studio punk designed to sound impressive through headphones while you sit quietly at your desk. These songs want sweaty rooms, battered trainers, people leaning over the barrier and a crowd that has forgotten for approximately 27 minutes that adulthood is mostly paperwork and bills.

Which makes the album release show at Loco Club on Friday 9 October particularly appropriate. Kill The President! will be joined by Asturian melodic-hardcore outfit Flashback and Valencia punk-pop bruisers Los Brackets, making the evening less of a launch party and more of a three-band excuse to rearrange the furniture. The show gets underway at 19:30, with tickets listed at €12.

And if Face The Tide is anything to go by, the Loco Club is going to get properly battered. What Kill The President! have achieved here is not revolutionary in the sense of reinventing punk rock from scratch, and nor should they have tried. Punk has survived precisely because bands keep finding new ways to take the basic ingredients — speed, melody, anger, humour, politics, friendship and the need to make an unreasonable amount of noise — and make them relevant to their own time and place. Face The Tide does exactly that, taking the familiar language of melodic hardcore and speaking it with a distinctly Valencia accent.

The result is an album that feels experienced rather than manufactured. It sounds like four musicians who have spent years hauling gear, crossing borders, playing festivals, sweating in clubs and gradually figuring out exactly what they want their band to sound like. The production gives the guitars enough room to bite without sanding away their rough edges, the rhythm section drives everything forward and the melodies ensure that the aggression never becomes exhausting. Most importantly, Face The Tide is fucking fun.

In an increasingly strange musical landscape where everything seems designed to be clipped into 15-second fragments and fed to an algorithm, there is something deeply satisfying about putting on a proper punk record and letting it run from beginning to end. Kill The President! understand that songs can still be weapons, that a chorus can still become a communal shout and that three minutes of distorted guitars can occasionally be more useful than three hours of doom-scrolling.

Face The Tide doesn't pretend the world is getting better. It simply refuses to accept that getting worse means we have to sit down and watch it happen. For a Valencia band with international ambitions, that is a pretty fucking strong statement. Face The Tide is melodic hardcore with its fists clenched and its heart firmly in the right place, and Kill The President! sound like a band that has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

Check it out here: Spotify