Grove Street Families - Shift (Video and Song)

Grove Street Families have had an exponential rise in the past few years, from having their records distributed by Birmingham’s own Kieran Murphy (Negative Reaction) to having signed to Venn Records. From writing songs all about Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and basing their image around the game (which is pretty dope), to being one of the UK’s most exciting and cutting edge hardcore bands.

GSF have been extremely active over the past 12 months, dropping their VOL.1 Mixtape, touring all over the UK and Europe and dropping visually brilliant videos for MAKE WITH IT and STONED 2 DEATH.

So here we are on the 24th August 2018, and Grove Street Families have dropped a new track called “Shift” with a late 80’s/early 90’s home video aesthetic to go alongside. And in true GSF fashion, the song dropped at 4:20pm (insert topical weed joke here).

The song itself start off a lot slower than most of the rest of their back catalogue, with a more experimental vibe, clearly drawing influence from 90’s american alt rock found all over the airwaves of that era. To me the intro reminds me of Epic by Faith No More, I have no idea why, but I back it.

As we hit the 40 second mark we’re thrown back into the typical GSF brand of hardcore, big chord riffing, D-Beats and two steps all with their own little metallic sprinkling. This is a sound that long time listeners of Grove Street Families will be extremely familiar with.

Although the song is extremely typical of the GSF sound, there is some natural evolution to the song writing. If you were to put The Los Santos EP next to this new song, you can see that they’ve refined their song writing and become much better arrangers and writers of music. The song itself wouldn’t have been entirely out of place on their last release. I feel that this is going to become the new GSF sound.

For me though, this new song doesn’t really get me super excited for any new material they may be putting out, that’s not a criticism of this song at all because it’s well written and has a high level of audio production, to me it just seems a little stale. This may be because my ears are just geared to heavier sounds, I prefer heavier sounding bands. (by the way that new Jesus Piece record absolutely fucking bangs, it’s absolutely daft.)

This review is by no means a general consensus of opinions on Shift at all, this is my personal opinion. If you agree or disagree, lets open a dialogue and discussion, tell me what you do and don’t like about it.

Final take: 6.5/10

By Jack Beale-Burchell