Let us dispense with the obvious first: yes, this is a short record. Four tracks. Fifteen minutes, by the band's own reckoning. In an era of bloated streaming-optimised forty-song catalogues designed to chase algorithmic favour, there is something almost revolutionary about a band that says *here are four songs, make of them what you will, and kindly turn it up*. The British music press has long understood that brevity, wielded correctly, is not a limitation but a weapon. The Buzzcocks knew it. The Undertones knew it. Now, from across the Atlantic, SONIC BOMB appear to know it too.

What strikes you first — and this will either thrill you or send you reaching for the volume knob in the wrong direction — is the sheer *velocity* of intent. These are songs that do not ease you in gently. There is no two-minute atmospheric intro, no studied noodling, no chin-stroking prologue. SONIC BOMB arrive the way a brick arrives through a window: suddenly, and with purpose. The EP's title itself signals something primal. *Like Lions Every Day.* Not occasionally. Not on special occasions. Every. Single. Day. That is the operational tempo these songs demand of you.

The band describe the listening experience as "windows-down, volume-up, all-gas, no-brake," and one appreciates that they have not reached for the tired lexicon of press release hyperbole — no talk of *sonic landscapes* or *genre-defying journeys* or music that *demands to be heard*. Instead, they offer an automotive metaphor so purely American in its sensibility that it almost constitutes a cultural document. And yet the music, one suspects, lands rather well in British ears too. We have always had a soft spot for honest rock 'n' roll that knows what it is and commits to it absolutely.

Crucially, SONIC BOMB resist the temptation — so common among guitar bands with something to prove — of overproduction. There is a rawness here that feels deliberate, a willingness to let the rougher edges breathe rather than sand them smooth in the pursuit of radio palatability. This is music that sounds as though it was made by people in a room together, which in 2026 is rarer and more valuable than it ought to be.

The four tracks hold together with the coherence of a band who've clearly spent time in the rehearsal room arguing productively. There is no obvious filler, no moment where the energy sags into obligation. Each song earns its place. The sequencing — though one hesitates to over-analyse a quarter-hour record — suggests an instinct for dynamics: tension and release, loud and slightly-less-loud, urgency followed by something that, in comparative terms, approaches a breath.

SONIC BOMB will tell you themselves that they are not for everyone. This is an admirably honest position, and one that paradoxically makes them more interesting than bands who claim universal appeal. The music press has always been more generous to artists who understand their own coordinates — who know, without apology, what they are making and why. *Like Lions Every Day* is the work of a band in full possession of themselves.

Give it fifteen minutes. Give it the volume it deserves. Give it the open road, or failing that, a well-ventilated room and the good sense to bother your neighbours slightly. SONIC BOMB have earned it.

*— Boston may have Paul Revere, but right now it has something considerably louder.*