Midnight

Midnight are a weird retro thrash band that just might be making fun of you. Their first EP was released in 2003, but they sound like they should have been making heavy music in the early '80s. It's kind of hard to tell to what extent they're just taking the piss out of everything heavy metal, but it hardly matters because everything they do absolutely crushes. Their retro speed-thrash-DIY-don't-give-a-fuck sound is reminiscent of metal's early days — when the genre was a lot closer to punk and degenerate fun than burning churches and making home-grown, brooding YouTube videos. Midnight are too intentionally good times to be Venom, but too evil to be Metallica on Kill 'em All. Complete and Total Hell is the result of a decade's worth of shredding, time-warping listeners back to their pre-pubescent years when we'd all just discovered metal, sew-on band patches and Doc Martin's that were absurdly high for skinny, wee-man kid legs. Compiling everything the band have produced before 2011's Satanic Royalty LP, Complete and Total Hell should rightly form the basis of all the in-door partying you'll be doing from now until next summer.