About two minutes into “Burn,” the second track on Black Eyes’ Hostile Design, Daniel Martin-McCormick yelps “Kill your shitty parents/let their blood flow free”: a signal that, in the two decades since the band last released new music, it has lost none of its anger. Born at the start of the century in the D.C. punk scene, Black Eyes—with two drummers, two bassists, two singers, and a guitar that sounded like Rowland S. Howard possessed by the ghost of Sonny Sharrock— upended the genre’s norms, melding no-wave noise and funk, percussive assault, and obtuse but guttural screeds against Bush-era America. By the time their second album, Cough, came out, a free-jazz influence had taken center stage, with songs that sounded like the work of a band ripping themselves to pieces only to reassemble them in new, misshapen ways. That the band’s last show happened before Cough even came out is unsurprising; a hurricane only holds together for so long.
So when Black Eyes reunited in 2023, it felt like a minor miracle. Hostile Design, in turn, is faced with an imposing question: How do you capture chaos in a bottle twice, years removed from the initial energy that fueled it? Though they’ve spent the past two years playing their older material on tour, Hostile Design doesn’t sound like an attempt to retread old ground; instead, in typical Black Eyes fashion, they attempt something new. Synthesizing the explosive tension and jazz squawk of their previous work while bringing their love of dub to the forefront, the band seems gleeful to stretch their songs into new forms and shapes; half of the album’s tracks are over six minutes long, luxuriating in echo and delay.
“Under the Waves” rides maybe the grooviest basslines the band has ever made, its flow not even disturbed by a noisy saxophone solo. Album closer “TomTom” is cavernous, the band triggering every reverberation that their instruments can muster, crafting a hypnotic sprawl haunted by Hugh McElroy’s constant chatting in Haitian Creole. Not that the band has lost all their energy. They build opener “Break a Leg” instrument by instrument, thumping bass piling atop frantic drums piling atop broken sax notes until it all explodes in the song’s final minute, Martin-McCormick and his guitar both letting out distorted screams, ripping his vocal chords to ribbons just like he did over 20 years ago.
