Brutal metallic hardcore juggernauts Walking Wounded emerge from Cleveland’s notoriously gritty and aggressive underground music scene with a fresh take on the Rust Belt city’s storied heritage.

Cleveland has a long history of producing ferocious groups that hybridize metal and punk’s most extreme genealogies, such as Integrity, Ringworm, and Apartment 213. Walking Wounded continues that tradition without parroting the sounds of their forebears.

“The goal of our music is to blend death metal riffs and mosh parts,” plainly states guitarist and primary songwriter Steve Perrino, who began Walking Wounded as a solo project during the enforced solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I needed a creative outlet for this heavy music I've wanted to do forever.”

Perrino is a longtime veteran of Cleveland’s punk and alternative scene and an established local producer. However, Perrino came of age in what he calls metallic hardcore’s golden age circa 2004-2008, and the pandemic gave him the opportunity to revisit those formative sounds. “It had been a long time since I had played heavy music, and that's primarily what I listen to.”

Perrino began writing and recording Walking Wounded songs alone in his studio before recruiting vocalist Noah Hardesty. In the spring of 2022, the pair released their debut single, “Birth,” a blistering slice of emotional powerviolence. That formative song showcases Perrino’s songwriting skill and Hardesty’s uncompromising voice but only hints at Walking Wounded’s determined excursion into darker and more deathly sounds.

Hardesty and Perrino enlisted drummer Pete Hanbury and bassist Tim Rutan to realize their mix of contemporary punk energy and slamming death metal tonality as a full band while releasing a series of singles and tapes. Along the way, the band earned a reputation as a remarkably heavy live act among Cleveland's tight-knit hardcore scene.

Their embryonic development culminated in 2024 with their debut, Bestial Condemnation. The six-song release, produced by Perrino,will be physically available for the first time via Relapse Records, including with the band's preceding discography as bonus tracks.

Perrino describes this definitive edition of Bestial Condemnation as “an encapsulation of the entire evolution of our band up to this point. If you listen from the beginning all the way through, you'll hear where we come from and the trajectory of both the songwriting and the musicianship. We’re continuing the contemporary old-school death metal revival while keeping in touch with our hardcore side,” Perrino says. “We want to continue to pull inspiration from both worlds.”

Or, better, listen to all six songs of Bestial Condemnation as a scathing introduction to Perrino and co’s grim delights. The one-two punch of “Battle Worn” and “Unholy Bargain” is a relentless discourse between melodic thrashing speed and driving, chugging catharsis. “Depravity” executes a high-speed hardcore bombing raid in just over one blistering minute, while “Anguished Solitude” slows things to a determined crawl that would make Obituary proud. The record’s highlight is “Food for the Crows,” possibly the quintessential Walking Wounded song.

“’Food for the Crows’ encapsulates every part of what we're trying to do right now,” Perrino says. “It’s got fast, thrashy stuff. It's got groovy death metal riff stuff. And it's got the heaviest mosh pit whenever we play it live. So, it's got all the elements of who we are and what we're trying to do.”

Guest spots from No Cure and You Die First reinforce Walking Wounded’s commitment to the scene that fostered them, but the record’s narrative backbone hints at a more expansive vision of their future.

Yes, Bestial Condemnation has a concept based on a story written by Hardesty. “It’s a fantasy story about a man consumed by his greed,” Perrino says. “Over time, he’s cursed to walk the earth as a beast.” Hardesty’s dark fantasy yarn is well-represented by the evocative cover art, a painting by prolific album artist Adam Burke.

But Walking Wounded aren’t pure fantasists; the band funnels sociopolitical indignation into the aptly named “Righteous Brutality” single in 2023. “Righteous Brutality was the first song we wrote together collaboratively,” Perrino says. “That’s an angry song toward homophobic people. We've always been vocal about that, and that's the value we stand on. In terms of a worldview, rights issues are things that we care about.”

To further destroy the opposition, Walking Wounded rounds out their early discography with a crushing cover of Dying Fetus’s “In the Trenches,” cementing their death metal bona fides.”Fetus is definitely one of our bigger influences, collectively,” Perrino confirms.

While Walking Wounded continues to write new material and expand its sound, the rebirth of Bestial Condemnation serves as a reminder that Cleveland’s music scene remains as vital and aggressive as ever, and Walking Wounded is ready to lead the charge into new territory.