You can tell a lot about a band from the way they list themselves on social media. ENDALL’s handles are @beerpatrol2022 and @endall_beerpatrol. Beer Patrol. That’s not a joke handle they made one drunk night and forgot to change — that’s the thesis. The whole project is built around a refusal to take heavy music seriously enough to ruin the fun, while taking the actual riff-writing extremely seriously. It’s a balance very few bands manage. ENDALL manages it on every record.

Modern thrash, written this decade

There’s a tendency, when a young Japanese band picks up thrash as a genre, to lean nostalgic. Bay Area cosplay. Studded wristbands. Reverence for 1986. ENDALL doesn’t do that. They’ve absorbed thrash, internalized it completely, and then kept writing. Their stuff sounds like a band who has been listening to all the heavy music that has happened since 1986 — metalcore, modern hardcore, beatdown, even some of the angrier electronic stuff. The result is thrash that knows what year it is, whatever year that happens to be.

Across their records their writing has only sharpened. The riffs land harder. The hooks are sharper. There’s a willingness to slow down where a less mature band would just blast through.

Club Citta is where it clicked for me

I caught them at Club Citta in Kawasaki, and that’s where I really got it. Club Citta is a 1300-capacity room with a stage built for a band that knows what it’s doing — meaning, you can’t fake your way through a Citta show. Plenty of bands take that stage and look small. ENDALL took it and made it look earned. The band was on, the crowd was on, the sound was huge, and the songs landed like they’d been canon for a decade.

By the third song people in the back were singing along. By the encore there was beer in the air. Beer Patrol, indeed.

For the foreign reader

If you’re outside Japan and want a way in: their discography is compact enough that you can chase the whole thing in an evening. Start anywhere. Their official site is endall.jp, where you’ll find their YouTube channel and current tour dates.

And if you’re flying in for shows: bring water and beer. You’ll need both.