Finding the right name for your band is a complex operation and the negotiation process can be painful, especially when the drummer or the bass player suggest a particularly cheesy name (drummers should, clearly, stick to hitting things rather than offer lexical insights while bassist should be happy to even be part of a band considering their usually limited skills). Trust me. I have no idea how these New York crusty punks came up with State Manufactured Terror but you know that when a band goes for a three words moniker, things get tough quickly. In any case it makes it hard for non-English speakers to pronounce the name without sounding like stuttering ducks? Crust does have a bit of a history when it comes to difficult band names. Anyone who has ever heard a French person say Constant State of Terror, Remains of the Day or Icons of Filth knows exactly what I'm talking about. I like the idea behind State Manufactured Terror though and they couldn't go for State Manufacture (too industrial) or State Terror (sounds like a corny name for a 90's German hardcore band) or Manufactured Terror (too philosophical and academic) anyway so they must have had to settle on this one. And well, the acronym SMT sounds alright too.
State Manufactured Terror have emerged from the very active contemporart New York punk scene that seemed to have gained a lot of momentum since the early 20's and they contribute to put this peculiar city on the crust map again. When you mentioned New York hardcore to someone it instantly conjures images of muscular lads wearing jerseys and bandanas, trying hard to look hard and idiots moshing brutally in "the pit", attitudes that are synonymous with hardcore for many people. So I'm really not talking about this part of the scene as you would expect. To an extent you might argue that bands like Crazy Spirit or Perdition and others that gravitated around them played a role in the rebirth of raw hardcore punk or heralded the coming of a new generation in New York, although things are never as mechanical of course. New York has always exerted a fascination around the world as towns proclaiming they are the center of the world often do. I cannot say I was ever really enamored with New York punk or the idea of New York punk maybe because if it did give birth to the grandiose Nausea, it also created Leftöver Crack and that sounds really scary indeed. This said, given the quality and the crustness of the new wave of soap-dodging punk bands there I might have to investigate in person one day.
Many recent or active New York bands are well worthy of interest (acts like Straw Many Army or Kaleidoscope have be come well-established bands that can appeal to different audiences) and, because I obviously cherish crust music and have been militantly advocating for the recognition of crust pants as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO (currently waiting for their reply), my attention quickly focused on the old-school crust revival taking place in the local squats. The town incontestably has a rich history when it comes to this sound with the hugely influential crust legends Nausea and the whole Squat or Rot scene with other smelly bands like Insurgence or Jesus Chrust. There haven't been many overtly crust bands in New York afterwards beside, from the top of my head, Atakke in the mid/late 00's, Zatsuon in the early 10's and Subversive Rite in the late 10's (they were more of an old-school metal-punk affair to be accurate but there is a Sacrilege influence after all so let's say they were concomitant to crust) so that the impressive current boom appears rather unexpected from abroad. Thanks to several successful tours Flower are undoubtedly the trend's headliners and undeniably one of the most exciting current crust bands but State Manufactured Terror utterly deserve to be praised too.
This tape is the first demo, released in 2023 on Peace of Mind, a local DIY cassette label responsible for a lot of brilliant recordings from the likes of Disputa, Witness or Love & Compassion (it does sound like the title of a book about the power of crystals but the music is actually ace). State Manufactured Terror is made up of people who also play in bands like Porvenir Oscuro, Headsplitters and Instinct? and is fronted by graffiti artist Wombat. Far from the often generic and predictable post Hellshock stenchcore that has largely become synonymous with the very name of the subgenre, State Manufactured Terror, in terms of sound and songwriting, keep it more old-school, at the very birth of crust between 1986 and 89. They could have played the Mermaid if you know what I mean. The atmosphere is chaotic at first and fairly raw which confers an oft sought-after but rarely achieved old-school vibe (presumably the demo was recorded in DIY conditions that might be rather similar to those of the pioneers) and as mentioned the band relies more on crust as era and moment rather than on a specific couple of bands. Being an elite crust expert, I can still hear Concrete Sox, early Heresy and Deviated Instinct but also some US bands like Confrontation or the little-known Cirrhosis and, well, I'm sure they love Bristol too. They sound abrasive, noisy and use different beats, from fast hardcore thrash to groovy dirty mid-paced metallic moments so the experience is pretty intense indeed. The band sounds really genuine with a real personality and politics, something that is not so common these days. The hand-drawn artwork looks as chaotic, dense and teeming as the music with a real punk feel reminiscent of these late 80's/early 90's pre-digital aesthetics. Well class.
The band released an Ep entitled The US Government is a Kleptocratic Doomsday Cult (making it almost harder to pronounce than the band's name) in 2024 on Autsajder Produkcija (Outsider Production, you get it?) and a split Lp in 2025 with Flower recorded live in the studio in Poland during their Euro tour with a very different production that makes it a very interesting listen indeed. Hopefully these lovely people have a full Lp in them.
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