A mere 23 seconds into "Craver" from the Copenhagen punk band Lower's sub-nine minute debut EP and it's clear the song is a threat, its shrill, piercing guitar line screeching on like fingernails against a chalkboard. The track's ensuing two minutes are characterized by their loud, slow-pummeling brashness, working with creaking, distorted tension and menacing drum rolls that nearly suffocate a vaguely tuneful bass line underneath. Hardly any of what frontman Adrian Toubro shouts throughout the air-deprived "Craver" is even reasonably audible, save for a permeating desire for something inherent to survival. He's sinking and dragging us down with him.

Occasionally Lower make space by shaping back the brutality. But it's only at the track's very end, as the band races off, that there's an essential release; it's over with what feels like a bloody blink of an eye. And last summer that's precisely what led Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt to note, after a sole Lower gig, in conversation with The New York Times, "it was almost annoying that they could be so good." No chance of grabbing one of the original 300 Walk On Heads copies now, but their label, Escho, who first brought us Iceage's debut, promises a repress is on the way.