My introduction to Gadget was their previous album, The Great Destroyer (2016). Like Coerced, that album was the band’s first proper release in 10 years. When The Great Destroyer came out, I was hosting a metal radio show as a grad student at my university’s student-run radio station, and I played songs from the album frequently on the show. A lot has happened since then: I graduated, moved back abroad for a few more years, was evacuated back to the U.S. at the start of the pandemic, went back abroad for a few more years, and then changed careers and moved back home again. A lot has also happened in Gadget’s world since 2016. Their longtime vocalist Emil Englund left the band in 2019 and was replaced by Emilia Henriksson in 2023. Second guitarist Kristofer Jankarls was added the same year. They also spent four years writing the material for Coerced, which is somewhat surprising since the total running time of the EP is just under 14 minutes. But, if Coerced is any indication, those lineup changes and years of writing have led to what could be a brilliant new chapter in their history.
The album begins with a fade in of droning feedback and a series of gradually slowing bass drum and cymbal hits that eventually morph into a brief but relentless blend of hardcore, grindcore, and death metal might. The most striking aspect, however, is how impressive the mix sounds. Both Coerced and The Great Destroyer were engineered in-house by the band’s longtime drummer William Blackmon, owner and engineer at The Overlook studio in Sweden. His skills as an audio engineer must have improved immensely over the last decade because the production quality on Coerced considerably exceeds that of The Great Destroyer. The Great Destroyer doesn’t sound bad, per se, but Coerced has a wider, fuller sound that feels like an all-encompassing aural siege as if the listener is sonically surrounded and being assaulted from all sides.
Much of the release similarly features hardcore- and death metal-inspired grindcore that doesn’t necessarily push boundaries, but the quality of the performances and production help push Coerced into a tier or two above the average grindcore release. Despite the straightforward approach to most of the writing, “Flatline” and closer “Violently Silent” offer a bit more variety. The former contains the most melodic segment of Coerced, no matter how brief, and seems reminiscent of some of Nasum’s most euphonious songwriting. The latter is the highlight of Coerced with its simple yet crushing groove.
If you’re a reader who has paid attention to my psychotic ramblings, you know that I am generally a proponent of experimentation and bands that take paths less traveled. “False Pulse,” which is an unstructured noise track, falls into this category. However, considering that it’s the penultimate track and comprises over ⅓ of the release’s running time, it seems both poorly placed and superfluous. If it were several minutes shorter, it would have functioned well as an intro or outro, or even a mid-album interlude. But with its placement and length, it comes off as fluff to merely extend the release’s running time. Considering that, it’s difficult to imagine why the band elected to include “False Pulse” rather than simply including a few more grindcore tracks.
With that in mind, it feels almost criminal for Gadget to provide only 14 minutes of new music (9 minutes when you exclude “False Pulse”), after a decade without a proper release. Nevertheless, Coerced features some of Gadget’s tightest, most frenetic, and best-produced work in their nearly 30-year career. If they continue to expand their writing to include more melodic elements, wider variations in tempo, and better incorporated noise (the former two being more prevalent on The Great Destroyer), then Gadget will be an even greater grindcore force to reckon with.