Hydra Vein Cuts Perpetual Violence Machine to Five Tracks and Twenty Three Minutes
Brighton Thrash Veterans Return with Five Tracks on Iron Shield Records
Hydra Vein released the Perpetual Violence Machine EP on 10 October 2025 through Iron Shield Records. Five tracks, twenty three minutes, no filler. The band formed in Brighton in 1987, and the British press spent the late eighties calling them Britain’s answer to Slayer, until they broke up in 1990. This is their first new material since the 2022 comeback record Unlamented.
You can listen to our full playlist which contains the artist’s music, and know more about the artist’s work by scrolling down the page.
Who Hydra Vein Made Perpetual Violence Machine For
The audience for this record is not casual. It is the listener who already owns Rather Death Than False of Faith, or who found it decades late through a reissue and wanted to know whether the band still had it.
That listener gets five cuts and no ballad. The title track opens at just over four minutes. Iron Men follows. Black Slammer is the longest thing here at five minutes and change, then Strive for Life and A Thousand Forms of Fear close it out. The whole record runs twenty three minutes, which is roughly one side of a 1988 thrash LP, and that is not an accident.
There is a second, wider audience too. Plenty of people came to British thrash through the current revival rather than the original run, and this sits in exactly that lane. Onslaught and the Brofest circuit are the nearest reference points.
Comparisons are easy to reach for and mostly fair. The Slayer tag the British press hung on them in 1988 still explains the tempo and the attack. Kreator is the better reference for what they are doing now, because the German band solved the same problem years ago, staying fast without turning into a nostalgia act.
The Line-Up That Cut the Record in Amsterdam
Bassist and songwriter Damon Maddison is the through-line. He founded the band in Brighton with his brother Nathan on drums, and he is still writing the material. The current four-piece is Ross Curry on vocals and guitars, Henry Pol on guitars, John den Buitelaar on drums and Maddison on bass.
The band is now based in Amsterdam, which explains a lot about how this record came together. They cut it at IJland Studios in the city. Tim Visser engineered and produced it, then Pete Maher mastered it.
That credit line matters more than it usually would. Plenty of reformed eighties bands come back with a muddy recording that flatters nobody. This one sounds clean enough that the riffs actually separate, so the writing gets a fair hearing instead of disappearing into the mix.
IndieMusic.News curator team: “The interesting decision on Perpetual Violence Machine is the running time. Twenty three minutes is short enough that nothing has to justify itself twice, and a reunion record is exactly where bands usually overreach. They wrote five songs and stopped. That restraint is why it holds up on a second listen.”
Early Response Came Fast for a Catalogue Release
Coverage arrived quickly for a record from a band that spent three decades apart. The Mexican outlet End Sessions ran a dedicated feature on the EP. Metal Temple reviewed it. The German site Zephyrs Odem covered it as well.
That spread is worth noting. Iron Shield Records is a German label, the record was cut in the Netherlands, and the coverage came in from Mexico and Germany before anywhere else. So the route to listeners here runs almost entirely outside the UK.
It describes how a reformed thrash act actually reaches people now. There is no domestic label push behind this. Instead the audience is distributed, and it finds records through Bandcamp pages, festival line-ups and word of mouth.
Where to Hear Hydra Vein and Join the Community
The band keeps a direct line to its listeners. There is an active Discord server, which is unusual for an act that predates the web by a decade, and it is where release news tends to land first.
Stream the EP on Spotify or buy it on Bandcamp, where the catalogue sits alongside rehearsal-tape material for anyone who wants the deeper history. There is also a video on YouTube.
The band’s artist pages are on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and Amazon Music. Finally, keep up on Facebook and Instagram.
