The self-titled debut by Toronto band METZ has already appeared on several of the more adventurous end-of-year lists, and within the first few seconds of album opener, Headache, it’s easy to see why it’s made such a strong impression: Few other releases of 2012 quite match this album’s level of sustained volume.

It all kicks off with a satisfyingly immense drum sound and rusty-edged caveman riffing with the vocals sounding like someone being thrown down a wind-tunnel. The kind of mechanized echo reminiscent of Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick, albeit far more haggard. It’s definitely rock n roll, but it’s disciplined, fast and streamlined. All sharp, well defined angles with nothing of the slacker-fuzz inherent in many of their contemporaries. In fact, despite the US noise-rock references which tend to show up in other reviews of METZ, there’s a certain confidence in the slab-like shapes their rhythms make that brings to mind a more European, post-industrial lineage (I can hear splintered bits of early Killing Joke in this for example). Knife on the Water begins like Test Department covering a Phil Spector ballad before falling over itself at precise right-angles so as to eventually collapse into a perfectly cuboid avalanche of no.

On Wet Blanket the bass guitar sounds like it’s being played with a knife rather than a plectrum, and builds on a droning repetition that really pummels. But it’s otherwise one of the more straightforward songs on the album. And for my tastes this band are at their best when the songs sound more like gargantuan architectural constructions than anything resembling standard rock music. For example on Wasted where it sounds like one half of the band are assembling scaffold while the other half are tearing it down with equal precision. Or in the verses to The Mule, where brutal rhythmic stomps are industrially bolted onto the wall with a pneumatic drill.

METZ is a confident, bloody-minded, loud, brutal polygon of a debut album and if they can shake off those last few tiny rags of vanilla indie rock, then its successor is bound to crush everything in its path. Not that there is really anything vanilla about this record. It smells of iron and chrome. This is ‘Metal’ music in the sense that it literally sounds as though the songs are made out of large pieces of hard shiny metal. One of the most exciting blocks of noise to drop from the Sub Pop label in a long time.

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By the way, if you’d like to hear even more noisy, angular, left-of-centre noise-rock, my band The Infinite Three are giving away our new single ‘Sharpy‘ for a limited time right here: www.theinfinitethreemusic.com