Daze of the Week

I called The Age of Entitlement the best thrash album of the 21st century when I reviewed it back in 2020, and I meant it enough that I closed the review saying I wasn't even looking forward to whatever came next, because it could only disappoint me. That's not usually how I feel about a band I love. It felt like Acid Reign had used up a stretch of songwriting luck that doesn't come around twice for anybody. Five years later, Daze of the Week showed up anyway, and I've spent the time since trying to figure out how they pulled it off a second time.

Some background if you don't know them: Acid Reign are one of the Big Four of British thrash alongside Onslaught, Sabbat, and Xentrix, born in Harrogate in the mid-80s and gone by 1991. They came back in 2015 with singer Howard "H" Smith as the only holdover from the original lineup, and it says something about how good The Age of Entitlement was that a nearly-thirty-year layoff barely registered. H has also spent the last 25 years working as a stand-up comic, and it shows: his sense of timing, cadence, and delivery carries these songs every bit as much as the riffs do.

That's obvious right away. 'The Who of You' spends its first minute building tension on a single riff before the song kicks the door in, and H sounds fantastic the second he opens his mouth. Clean vocals have gotten rare in thrash (most of the genre's drifted toward a barked, almost death-metal delivery), so this much charisma is a real jolt.

'Daze of the Weak' backs it up with a chorus that would fit right in on The Age of Entitlement. 'No Truth' is a stomper with a chorus that flirts with groove metal before snapping straight back into thrash, and 'Conniption King' layers overlapping vocal lines into its chorus ("I don't care what you have to say / what do you know anyway") for more depth than most thrash choruses bother with. Four songs in, there isn't a weak one in the bunch.

Then 'Alonely' shows up, and it's a genuine problem. Musically it never lets up for a second, but the chorus is built around the line "why am I alonely," delivered with a cheesiness that belongs on a late-career Metallica ballad, not here. It's a real momentum killer in the middle of an otherwise flawless run, and I'll be programming it off the album the same way I've programmed 'Sense of Independence' off The Age of Entitlement for years.

Everything after it rights the ship completely. 'Blind Lies' plays it straight for almost four minutes before rocketing into a closing stretch built to be moshed to, punctuated by H spitting "unless it's rigged, you can't play the game, you fucking scum" with a delivery that gave me actual goosebumps. 'Sorrowsworn' keeps the streak going with a sharp bit of political phrasing ("nothing good will ever come from an oligarch, a vote, or a gun"), and 'Old Young Man' is the peppiest thing here, its hooks taking a listen or two to sink in before they're stuck for good.

'Fantastic Passion' is the lead single and the biggest chorus by a wide margin, an honest-to-god Barnstriker (Firesideometer canon at this point), tucked in near the end instead of up front because this band apparently has enough songs like it to spare. Closer 'Centre of Everything' opens with H trying something I've never heard from him: a half-sung, half-spoken verse delivered with a thousand-yard, dead-eyed stare, like he's checked out and shell-shocked, nothing like the charisma everywhere else on the record, before the song doubles its speed into a chorus that undersells itself against the thrashier sections around it, a hook that only reveals itself a few spins in. It ends the record on exactly the kind of controlled, still-building intensity a closer should have.

So how does it stack up? The Age of Entitlement was a run of 10s with a couple of soft spots. Daze of the Week trades a couple of those peaks for consistency: maybe one or two songs reach that same perfect mark, and the rest sit comfortably around 8.5, 'Alonely' aside. That's enough to land in the exact same place on my scorecard. Which one you like more probably comes down to which one you heard first. It's Swervedriver's Raise versus Mezcal Head: both albums rule, and asking a fan to rank them is a losing game.

If you spent the last five years wondering whether The Age of Entitlement was a fluke, Daze of the Week says it wasn't. Check out 'Daze of the Weak', 'Conniption King', 'Blind Lies', and 'Fantastic Passion'.