Harmful - 7

After fragmenting into a million different sub-genres in the 90s, rock music seems to have gathered up its skirt, stopped sleeping around and returned to the idea that playing in a particular tuning or wearing a certain style isn't what makes you good - it's your songs! That's utter nonsense of course, but listening to Harmful's seventh album, it's nice to imagine that music like this is commonplace: melodic without being twee, heavy without being meat-brained, moving without being emo, catchy without being shit. It's almost as if they've got an ex-member of Faith No More playing guitar after having spent ten years in the wilderness - otherwise you could close your eyes and almost hear the same production as on Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning. There's something about good rock music, a rare commodity now, that has (to steal a phrase from VICE) hetro-boners popping up right across the globe. [Ali Maloney]