Nine-Fingered Fury is not a band for beginners. This isn’t a starting point for the innocent. This is a band that shows up when life’s journey has already taken something from you. When your heroism has curdled into endurance. When the grand narrative has collapsed in your mind, and you have entered that phase of life where putting one foot in front of the other in the dark, is the only testatement to the memory of who you once thought you would be. If that sounds like complaining then you haven’t been paying attention, because this is not the sound of complaint, this is the sound of people who understand that the real music starts when the mythology runs out.

Distorted guitars worn in the way a good pair of boots gets worn, shaped by use, carrying the evidence of where they’ve been, vocals that feel dragged from somewhere rather than placed, zero interest in polish or in the kind of production sheen that lets a band hide behind its own surface: this is where Nine-Fingered Fury live, squarely in the bloodline of alternative rock at its most raw, its most honest. Here music is stripped of pretense, and becomes most stubbornly committed to the proposition that weight is not a flaw in the music but the whole damn point.

What sets them apart is not the volume, the volume is just the volume, and volume alone is the most boring thing a rock band can offer you, it is the perspective. The title track Carry It Anyway, speaks of endurance when triumph is no longer a realistic outcome, when responsibility won’t let up, when the resentment creeps in and you can feel the slow irreversible realisation that you are not the same person who started this and there is no going back to find them. The message is sharpened, and refined in Blister Road, before the burningly painful and achingly empty, Last Hand Left drives the point home like a Nazgul blade.

There is a wider mythology hinted at in the margins, backgrounds glimpsed rather than explained, fragments of something larger never spelled out, and the band treats it exactly right, as background noise, as the context you’re already living in whether you registered it or not, because the best rock and roll has never needed to explain the world it was made in, it just needed to sound like it came from that world without lying about the cost.

Live, it lands exactly how you’d expect if you’d been paying attention: loud, unvarnished, just controlled enough to keep it from physically falling apart, the kind of set that doesn’t try to win you over because winning you over would require acknowledging that you needed to be won, and Nine-Fingered Fury have no time for that, they, like you, have enough to carry. More than enough.