If you were lucky enough to catch Ho99o9 (pronounced ‘Horror’ if you’re looking at that and wondering where to start) recently on tour with The Dillinger Escape Plan or on the festival scene then you know that this is a group who are equal parts unpredictable and excellent. Excellent because whether you’d heard any of their music before or not there is absolutely no doubting that you were walking around with a “What the fuck was that!?” look plastered on your face in the immediate aftermath.

Across music there are artists who are content with playing it safe, and whilst of course a lot of these will be some of your favourite bands, there are genuinely not enough groups who are talented enough to be able to shred the rulebook to pieces before metaphorically spitting it back in your face and make a genuine impact in doing so. Ho99o9 not only do this on The United States Of Horror (Toys Have Powers), but they do so with a shot of adrenaline harder than anything Mia Wallace has experienced.

If you’re coming into this completely green and wondering what on earth they’re all about, Ho99o9 combine Hip-Hop, Hardcore, Punk and Industrial into one gigantic blender and, yes, that does sound like a bit of a mess but they’ve got it firmly under control.

Imagine John Hammond from Jurassic Park holding four velociraptors on leashes, choosing to loosen his grip on one or two at a time to let them go nuts before pulling them back in line again. The record opens with a short intro in which a young girl pledges allegiance to the burning flag of the United States of Horror before throwing into the aggressively heavy Hip-Hop centric ‘War Is Hell’. The next track ‘Street Power’ blends this sound with huge slabs of old-school New York Hardcore Punk, but you’ll soon find that as the album progresses, the kind of curveballs that are launched your way from all over the place. It all just works so brilliantly in tandem when done right and Ho99o9 have certainly got it very right on this record.

The production is very good too, get this cranked up on a good pair of headphones and people three carriages down on the train will be bouncing their head too (probably not to be fair, we all know how angry our fellow commuters are). But this is definitely an album that needs to be played loud, tracks like ‘Knuckle Up’ provides the perfect avenue for a true cathartic release for example.

Overall then, if there were any questions over whether Ho99o9 could deliver as effectively on record as they do in the live arena then this album is the exclamation point to the slap in the face for even asking.

8.5/10

TOM DONNO