"Truly, Pound Land are the voice of a disaffected and screamingly angry generation. Or they would be if they could get people to pay attention to their clarion call. The resistance and the rebellion start here."
- Dark Juan, Ever Metal
www.ever-metal.com/2024/04/29/pound-land-mugged/
"'Mugged' is not nice: in fact, it’s harrowing, gnarly, overtly unpleasant. But it is also entirely necessary"
- Christopher Nosnibor, Aural Aggravation
tinyurl.com/4fudeyat
"Pound Land have once again made themselves impossible to criticise; producing an album driven out of raw emotion and encapsulating those feelings about the subject perfectly, every word and instrument complements one another, resulting in Mugged being everything it was intended to be; satisfying yet unsettling, and indiscreetly real."
- Jake Hancke, The Cauteriser
cauteriser.co.uk/2024/03/09/pound-land-mugged-album-review/
"Recorded in a studio in a day, ala The Beatles with their debut LP Please Please Me, but whereas The Beatles captured the excitement and joy and the freedom of being young in 1963, Mugged by Pound Land captures the terror and horrors of life in the UK in 2024: the poverty, violence and dying high-street where closing banks are replaced by food banks and people working full time cannot afford to heat their houses or feed their kids."
- Brian Bordello, Monolith Cockktail
monolithcocktail.com/2024/03/04/our-daily-bread-613-poundland-john-howard-the-blow-monkeys-mark-e-moon/
“a dark yet unnervingly accurate reflection of the UK in 2024. As our politicians grin through their lies, Mugged feels like the grotesque painting lurking in the attic.”
- Andy Brown, Louder Than War
louderthanwar.com/pound-land-mugged-album-review/
"Pound Land manages to take us completely by surprise with their noise attack that forges Drunks With Guns , Brainboms , Drunk In Hell and Flipper into one devastating whole. And then there is the saxophone that provides extra distraction and, as it were, manages to leave its mark throughout everything, a bit like James White / Chance did with Teenage Jesus & The Jerks."
- Patrick Bruneel, Luminous Dash
luminousdash.be/reviews/pound-land-mugged-cruel-nature/
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Following 2023's critically-acclaimed album "Violence", Pound Land return with "Mugged" which despite being their 7th album release, is the first to have been fully recorded in an actual studio.
Recorded live in one intense day at Tremolo Studios, Stoke-on-Trent (UK), 'Mugged' is a 48-minute whirl of raw frustration, kitchen-sink surrealism and filthy noise-punk sludge, soundtracking vitriolic stream of consciousness societal observations.
It's also the first album to fully feature the Pound Land band that many experienced on last year's UK tour: Founding duo Nick Harris and Adam Stone, along with Rich Lamell on bass, Steve Taylor on drums and Jo Stone on sax. Additionally on this album, Jase Kester of Omnibadger/Omnibael joins on electronics.
"Pound Land do not release music to drink beer to on a sunny Sunday. They are the real rage against the machine – an uncompromising, uncomfortably harsh grind that speaks hidden and unfortunate truths over a machine-like grinding, a smoke belching, diesel-fuelled mill engine powering a colossal, faceless, brutalist concrete building that crushes dreams and excitement and individuality and the beauty of youth" (10/10)
- Dark Juan, Ever Metal
"Pound Land have somehow perfectly represented the state of the United Kingdom in audio form, which is as bleak and worryingly relatable, yet furiously beautiful as you could possibly imagine."
- Jake Hancke, The Cauteriser
"Rarely has a band so perfectly captured the zeitgeist through a horrible mess of noise that makes you physically hurt and ache and feel like you’re being subjected to an array of tortures. This is the world. This is Britain"
- Christopher Nosnibor, Aural Aggravation