The Los Angeles grunge-punk bruisers have been described, with pleasing bluntness, as "Alternative Rock's Loudest Middle Finger" — a billing they have done absolutely nothing to undermine on *Other Side of Noise*, a full-length years in the making and released, defiantly, at full volume. This is not a comeback record, as the band are at pains to point out. It's a return with intent. There's a meaningful distinction there, and it matters: comebacks are nostalgic, self-congratulatory affairs. Intent implies direction. It implies somewhere still to go.

The album's backstory begins with last year's single "Fire" — a track shaped, we're told, by the devastating reality of the Los Angeles wildfires and released with unusual care and deliberateness for a band of this sonic temperament. It functioned as a distress flare; a way of saying, quietly beneath all the noise, *we're still here.* The quietness, needless to say, was entirely relative. The amps, one suspects, were never turned down.

From that foundation, *Other Side of Noise* builds something genuinely substantial. The album's philosophy is articulated with characteristic directness in its title — there is the noise, the press release explains with admirable self-awareness, "the industry chatter, the trend-chasing, the plastic rebellion packaged for radio," and then there is the other side of it. Tijuana Bullfight have staked their entire existence on the belief that something honest, something real, lives on that other side. Whether or not you share their faith, it is very difficult to listen to this record and accuse them of bad faith.

The new single "Other Than Me… Too" is the album's current calling card, and it earns the role. Hooks-first, teeth bared, it is — and here one must reach for the technical vocabulary — an absolute belter. The guitars grind with the mechanical persistence of something that cannot be reasoned with, the rhythm section doesn't so much keep time as enforce it, and the chorus lands with the kind of clean, savage simplicity that most songwriters spend entire careers failing to achieve. *Don't know what you need / Other than me.* It's a blameshifter's worst nightmare: no apology, no counter-argument, no patience whatsoever for the kind of emotional negotiation that lesser songs would offer. The lyric video keeps pace — "say the truth, yeah I'm neglected" lands in the headlights and stays there.

Then there is "Forward Things Don't Look So Great," arguably the record's emotional centre, and a track whose title alone earns considerable affection in the current climate. The writing here stays, in the band's own words, "blunt and human" — *I don't want to know / things aren't what they seem* — and what makes it work is precisely what the press release identifies: this is not polished despair. It's the kind you recognise immediately. The restless spiral of "I don't really belong" becomes, paradoxically, a communal experience when delivered at this velocity and volume. Grunge always understood this paradox. Tijuana Bullfight understand it too.

What separates this record from mere genre exercise — from the many bands currently rummaging through the charity shops of 1992 for a usable aesthetic — is the welding, as the band describe it, of "grunge weight and punk velocity." These are not always natural bedfellows. Grunge, at its most compelling, is about gravity: the pull downward, the heaviness of things, the sense that the earth itself is exerting unusual pressure. Punk is about escape velocity. To hold both forces in the same song without one cancelling the other out requires a particular kind of tension management, and *Other Side of Noise* manages it more often than not. The choruses don't ask permission. The guitars feel, as advertised, like the only honest language left.

A summer tour follows. Good. This record deserves rooms where the amps are too loud and the crowd forgets what they're supposed to like. That's precisely where it was built. That's precisely where it belongs.

*Released 2026 via TJBF Global | Grunge-Punk*