Party Cannon – Subjected To A Partying EP
Party Cannon – Subjected To A Partying EP
Unique Leader Records
Release Date: 27/03/26
Review by Jon Deaux
7.5/10
Party Cannon have always been a band that occupies a space that extreme metal, as a genre, either refuses to acknowledge or actively represses – that point where the genre’s fixation with transgression loops back around to farce, and farce becomes sincerity. “Subjected To A Partying” doesn’t resolve that conflict, it simply heightens it, prods it with a stick, and then films it with a garish HD camera. They are not a band that is sobering up or maturing in any sense of the word. They are a band that has stared into the face of their own idiocy and decided to use it to their advantage with renewed focus.
As a young band, Party Cannon were like an intrusive thought that had taken physical form – a brutal slam band with a birthday party aesthetic that had managed to accidentally book a death metal band. That was then a provocation, a means to an end. Now, it seems to be a means to a method. “Subjected To A Partying” is a very calculated, almost pedagogical, approach to breaking down the band’s influences and serving them back to you like a series of grotesque specimens in a mad scientist’s lab. Slam, goregrind, early-2000s brutality preserved like a fossilised energy drink, New York Death Metal as a blunt instrument. It’s reductive, sure, but that’s kind of the point – that most genre innovation, no matter how ‘innovative’ or ‘groundbreaking’ it may be, begins with stripping back to the bare, unpleasant essentials.
‘Parisian Bedbug’ establishes the tone with aggressive hostility from the get-go, with its riff feeling more like a threat to the body than an invitation to listen. The production is squashed, over-compressed, and unapologetically physical. It’s music that doesn’t want to be listened to so much as suffered through. Yet, beneath all this blunt trauma, there’s a sense of control. Every pause, every lurching breakdown seems to be carefully calculated to test the limits of the listener’s attention span. It’s slam as systems engineering: input riff, output concussion.
‘Thirst Trap’ commits fully to this brain-scramble aesthetic, with its title being far more significant than initially apparent. Party Cannon have always thrived on excess, and here, excess is being used to commentate on the world. It’s engineered like a piece of digital clickbait, with each grotesque element being arranged with a degree of efficiency.
The new vocalist, Daryl Boyce, sounds less like a vocalist and more like a hostile interface, barking orders from inside the machinery. It’s ugly, it’s funny, and it’s uncomfortably accurate—a song that understands its place within the culture as a series of increasingly loud gestures fighting to get attention before succumbing to sludge.
There’s something almost theological about Party Cannon and their relationship with stupidity. It’s not just that they use humor as a means to get at their subject matter; they use it as a pressure. ‘Improper Use Of A Speculum’ is not just obscene due to subject matter, but due to its complete unwillingness to give the listener any distance. The riffing is slow, punishing, and grotesquely exposed, like a body being held under fluorescent lights for too long. Martin Gazur’s drumming is less about timekeeping and more about crowd control, herding the chaos with military efficiency. It’s here that Party Cannon’s seriousness can’t be avoided. Jokes don’t land this hard by accident.
It’s at this juncture that “Subjected To A Partying” shows its nastier side, with these remixes being acts of self-sabotage that somehow add to the overall product. In ‘Thirst Trap’ by Kmac2021, the original is broken down into digital sludge, taking its worst qualities to an illogical extreme. Frontierer’s remix takes Party Cannon into a harsher, less-than-human realm, sanded down to an industrial dread that replaces what little warmth was present. Ritual Studio’s remix is almost like a ceremony, an occult ritual using repetition as a form of punishment, with the rhythm transformed into ritualistic pain. These remixes are like a distorted mirror, revealing aspects of the band’s sound that they’d rather keep hidden under their inflatable props.
The live tracks from Glasgow finish off the EP not with a bang, but with a whimper – or, rather, a documentation of Party Cannon in their natural habitat, sweaty, over-amplified, and on the brink of implosion. Gone are the jokes, replaced by something akin to communal endurance. ‘Human Slime’ sounds less like a song, more like a state of being, a moment when both the performer and audience agree to become unrecognizable as such. Any lingering doubts that Party Cannon’s aesthetic is a crutch to avoid commitment are forgotten, overwhelmed by the sheer volume and feedback.
Ultimately, what “Subjected To A Partying” seeks to prove through sheer volume, excess, and a very particular brand of juvenile enthusiasm: extreme metal’s fixation on purity is a joke. Party Cannon never seeks to make fun of extreme metal from an outside perspective, however. Rather, they’re a band embedded within it, taking extreme metal’s worst qualities and blowing them up to an unignorable level. What this EP presents is a tight, aggressive, and in many ways limited work, and a very self-aware one at that. It’s heavy music that seeks to mock you for seeking some level of dignity within it, and then punish you for not realizing just how much work went into stripping it away.
It’s not a perfect work, not an attempt at any kind of timelessness, but it’s a ruthlessly effective work at what it seeks to do: a tightly focused, darkly comedic, and very punishing work from a band that understands both the joke and the work required to execute it. It’s a work from a band that’s honed their chaos rather than watering it down and trusting the listener to survive it.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Parisian Bedbug
02. Thirst Trap
03.High Tariff Behaviour
04. Improper Use Of A Speculum
05. Thirst Trap (Kmac2021 Remix)
06. Low IQ Behaviour (Frontierer Remix)
07. High Tariff Overture (Ritual Studio Remix)
08. High Tariff Behaviour (Live In Glasgow 2025)
09. Human Slime (Live In Glasgow 2025)
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