After the stopgap Blues Pills Live in 2015, the international rock quartet returns with Lady in Gold, a proper sophomore full-length. It also marks the studio debut of drummer André Kvarnström. When the title track single was issued, some fans of the Blue Cheer-meets-Janis Joplin attack on the first album were taken aback by its embrace of rocking soul. Some even went so far as to accuse vocalist Elin Larsson of trying to emulate Adele. Evidently, they'd either forgotten – or didn't know – that Adele derived her singing style from Aretha Franklin. Larsson is a rabid Queen of Soul fan.
The third studio full-length from the Oxnard, California-based powerviolence/grindcore unit, You Will Never Be One of Us clocks in at just under 22 minutes. Their longest outing to date, the ten-track set would be less of a marathon were it not for the epic eight-minute closer "They Come Crawling Back," a doomy, thrashy, and relentlessly brutal bit of business that boasts the album's lone fade-out; it actually exhausts itself. The rest of You Will Never Be One of Us closely mirrors Nails' previous offerings, delivering forehead-melting blastbeats, whammy bar-induced audio grand mal seizures, and lyrics that target the sickly sweet spot between apoplectic and hopeless.