Hateful Abandon: ‘Threats’ and a Bleak Dispatch From a Broken Britain

A decade can be a lifetime in popular music, long enough for genres to rise and fall, for technologies to reshape listening habits, and for youthful rebellion to soften into adult compromise. For Hateful Abandon, a duo from Bristol, England, a 10-year hiatus from recording has seemingly served not to mellow their outlook, but to sharpen it. On August 29, the band is set to release ‘Threat,’ its fourth album and first since 2014, following an independent digital release in February. The record is a stark and uncompromising statement, less a comeback than a vitriolic commentary on a changed world.

The album is framed as a report from a self-imposed exile, a dispatch from a Britain the band views as fundamentally broken. Promotional materials for the release function as a manifesto, cataloging the grievances of a society in what they describe as terminal decline. “Bankers are getting richer, cops more corrupt,” the statement reads. “Politicians are stuffing their pockets and running entire nations into the ground.” The album, positioned by the band as an act of “pessimistic, blue-collar cultural warfare,” is an articulation of this worldview.

The decade between records coincides with one of the most turbulent periods in modern British history, marked by the Brexit referendum, years of austerity, a global pandemic that exposed deep societal fissures, and constant political upheaval. Hateful Abandon’s long silence was not an absence but a period of observation, and the new album is its verdict.

The album’s title, ‘Threat,’ is thus a deliberate and confrontational statement. It suggests a warning, both in the confrontational nature of the music and in its diagnosis of the world it depicts. It is a single word that encapsulates a worldview of pervasive menace, a fitting banner for a dispatch from the precipice.

A History of Industrial Noise and Urban Dissent

The caustic fury of ‘Threat’ has its roots in Bristol, the city where the project was formed in 2004. Hateful Abandon is the creative partnership of two multi-instrumentalists, Martin Brindley, who performs as “Vice Martyr,” and Tom Price, known as “Swine.” Brindley, who had previously recorded under the alias “Vintyr” with the black metal project Abandon, founded Hateful Abandon as a solo act before it expanded into a duo with Price. The group spent its first decade forging a sound from the serrated edges of Britain’s musical counter-cultures.

The band’s 2008 debut, ‘Famine (or Into the Bellies of Worms),’ established its trajectory. It was a collision of disparate, often hostile, genres: dark pop, post-punk and the lingering echoes of black metal, all fused into what one reviewer described as a “dark psychedelic haze.” The album drew comparisons to foundational figures of gothic rock like The Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division, as well as the brooding balladry of Nick Cave, suggesting a project more invested in atmosphere and alienation than in adhering to any single scene’s orthodoxy.

Following their 2011 album, ‘Move,’ the duo delivered what stands as the definitive statement of their first era, ‘Liars/Bastards,’ on March 31, 2014. The album was a direct confrontation with the state of the nation, described as a “misanthropic missive from Britain’s political wastelands.” Its cover art — a stark, black-and-white image of riot police set against the Union Jack — was an unambiguous declaration of intent. Musically, it drew heavily from the traditions of anarcho-punk, industrial noise and cold, synthesized darkwave, creating a sound of “dystopian vision” and “cadaver-ridden angst” that felt both revolutionary and deeply rooted in a specific lineage of British dissent.

This deliberate fusion of styles is not merely aesthetic experimentation; it is a political act. The band’s evolution from a project with distant black metal roots to a hybrid sound mirrors their anti-authoritarian stance. Vice Martyr has openly expressed contempt for genre conventions, calling them a “total con, created by music journalists in suits and ties that want to sell you magazines.” By weaving together the nihilism of black metal, the intellectual dread of post-punk and the direct-action politics of anarcho-punk, Hateful Abandon created a sonic language that refuses categorization. This musical homelessness — a refusal to belong to any single scene — is a potent metaphor for their political alienation.

The band’s origin in Bristol is also significant. The city has long been a crucible for dark, atmospheric and politically conscious music, from the fractured funk of post-punk pioneers The Pop Group to the paranoid, dub-inflected soundscapes of trip-hop artists like Massive Attack and Portishead. Hateful Abandon’s blend of rhythmic, machine-like industrial beats, cavernous textures and raw political anger places them firmly within this regional tradition of bleak, urban sound art.

Echoes From a Post-Industrial Wasteland

The musical traditions Hateful Abandon inhabits were forged in another era of British crisis. The sounds of post-punk and industrial music emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s from the wreckage of the United Kingdom’s industrial base, a movement shaped by deteriorating cities and widespread disillusionment that intensified under the government of Margaret Thatcher. It was music born of collapse.

Among the band’s professed influences are some of the era’s most uncompromising artists: the tribal rage of Killing Joke; the Mancunian dread of Joy Division; the mechanized grind of Godflesh; the raw politics of the anarcho-punk band Amebix; the confrontational noise of Swans; and the pioneering electronic textures of Cabaret Voltaire and Coil. These groups were not simply writing songs; they were creating a sonic language to articulate the experience of societal decay.

That language was a direct reflection of post-industrial Britain. The clanging percussion, droning synthesizers and monotone vocals were the sounds of the environment. In Sheffield, the industrial band Cabaret Voltaire established a studio, Western Works, in an old cutlery factory, its music echoing the metallic clang of the city’s dying industry.

The group’s stated goal was to be “confrontational,” to “destroy the Beatles” and the comfortable pop culture they represented. That Hateful Abandon continues to use this sonic palette in 2025 suggests a belief that the underlying conditions of alienation have not disappeared, but have merely mutated.

A core principle of this lineage is the necessity of an outsider’s perspective. Authenticity, it was argued, required distance. John Lydon of the Sex Pistols famously dismantled the band at its peak, disgusted by punk’s commercialization, to form the experimental Public Image Ltd. The Sheffield bands thrived on friction and were often banned from venues. Hateful Abandon’s creative process is a modern manifestation of this impulse.

‘Threat,’ like their previous work, was written and recorded entirely by the “secluded duo with zero outside input,” as their press materials state. This isolation is not just about creative control; it is a philosophical stance, suggesting that an honest critique of a corrupt system must be rendered from outside of it.

The Anatomy of a ‘Threat’

The new album is a concise, brutalist statement: eight songs in 38 minutes. It is a work that, according to the band, “picks up straight from where the band had vanished back in 2014,” a deliberate continuation of its established vision. In a culture that prizes evolution, this is a statement in itself. It suggests the duo’s worldview has not shifted but has been validated by the events of the last decade. The world, in their estimation, has simply caught up to the bleakness they were already describing. The lack of sonic change is the message: The problems are the same, only worse.

The album’s track list reads like a tour through a collapsing society. It begins with ‘Nuclear Thread Worker,’ a title evoking alienated, hazardous labor. It moves to ‘Shithouse,’ a term of pure contempt. ‘Shimmer Road’ follows, a name dripping with irony. The figures who inhabit this world appear in ‘Scavenger’ and ‘Waster.’ The structures of control are named in ‘Dome’ and ‘The Grid,’ titles that recall dystopian fiction. The album concludes with ‘Sculptures,’ which could imply the monuments left after a final collapse. The sequence is a cohesive, grim narrative that, in the label’s words, tells “the story of a deafened world headed straight into doom.”

The sound is a meticulously crafted weave of post-punk, industrial, anarcho-punk and darkwave. It generates a maelstrom of paranoia and revulsion, evoking the barren wasteland of broken cities and ruined lives that the band’s promotional materials describe. It is the sound of resentment given form, an expression of helplessness transformed into an intimidating sonic weapon.

An Album Unseen, A Message Un-toured

Hateful Abandon’s strategy for ‘Threat’ is as confrontational as its music. There are no music videos for lead singles; the primary visual offering is a full-album audio stream on YouTube, accompanied by static artwork. The band also has no upcoming tour dates, with its last documented performance in August 2015.

This absence of conventional marketing appears to be a deliberate choice. The modern music economy is built on the single and on algorithmic playlists that often dismember albums into commercially optimized units. By releasing its work primarily as a complete, 38-minute audio file, Hateful Abandon rejects that model, forcing the listener to engage with ‘Threat’ on the band’s terms: as a singular, uninterrupted statement. The approach aligns with its mission of “cultural warfare,” refusing to break its critique into easily marketable pieces.

The lack of live performances serves a similar purpose. A tour is typically an act of communion between artist and audience. Hateful Abandon’s music, however, is not about catharsis but diagnosis. The work is the product of a “secluded duo,” and presenting this insular, misanthropic material in a communal setting would contradict its message. The studio recording is the definitive version, an artifact to be confronted in isolation, not a performance to be consumed as entertainment.

Conclusion

Hateful Abandon returns to a British musical landscape where post-punk has re-emerged as a dominant critical and cultural force. In the last decade, a new wave of bands from the United Kingdom and Ireland — including acts like Dry Cleaning, Black Midi, Squid, Shame and Fontaines D.C. — has gained widespread acclaim for reviving the genre’s angular guitars and spoken-word vocals to comment on modern anxieties.

Yet Hateful Abandon remains, by design, what its label calls a “defiant outsider cult.” Its sound is a more extreme and less accessible fusion, incorporating the abrasive textures of industrial music and the bleakness of black metal — elements largely absent from the more indie-rock-adjacent revivalist bands.

Where many of its contemporaries observe social decline with wit or irony, Hateful Abandon’s approach is direct and confrontational. Their perspective is not one of detached observation, but of visceral immersion. This makes the band an uncomfortable counterpoint to the contemporary scene, offering the raw, unfiltered rage that more celebrated groups often stylize.

Perhaps the most potent statement made by ‘Threat’ is its very existence. That a musical language forged in the industrial collapse of the 1970s feels so resonant in 2025 suggests that the underlying crisis never ended, but simply became a permanent condition. The album’s power comes not from novelty, but from its stark consistency.

It is, as the band’s materials state, a product of a “corrupt and broken Britain, a problem that would not be going away any time soon… and neither will they.” The album’s final threat is its assertion that the dystopia it describes is not a future possibility, but a present reality.