Headache

METZ arrived on the noise rock scene in 2012 with a sound that felt less like music being played and more like something structural giving way. "Headache" is one of the clearest expressions of that aesthetic — a track that doesn't build so much as it simply arrives at maximum pressure and dares you to stay in the room. The guitar work is immense and almost deliberately ugly, thick with distortion, feedback threatening at every edge, riffs that prioritize visceral impact over any conventional idea of melody. The drums are the secret weapon: Hayden Menzies plays with a physicality that you can feel in the chest even through speakers, hitting with a precision that keeps the chaos organized just enough to function as music rather than pure noise. Alex Edkins' vocals sit somewhere between a bark and a howl, urgency completely uncut, the kind of delivery that makes you believe whatever he's conveying even if the words aren't perfectly legible. The track belongs to a lineage that runs from Big Black through Unsane and into the 2010s noise rock revival, but METZ never sound like historians — they sound like true believers. You'd reach for this when something needs to be blasted out of your system, when the ordinary volume of your life feels insufficient, when you want music that doesn't ask permission to be overwhelming.