The reason why Thrash Metal lost a lot of its popularity to Death Metal years ago was mainly because the whole genre became so predictable, polished and repetitive. Every band either turned into a TESTAMENT or KREATOR clone or went for a more melodic approach (you may blame it on METALLICA’s major breakthrough) rather than focusing on the true values that made everything so exciting and fresh. Poland’s THE NO-MADS luckily return to the roots of pure Thrash, delivering a highly energetic, raw and aggressive collection of very well crafted songs on their second full length “Deranged” (the follow-up to 2003’s “No Hush Till Thrash”). The band is obviously not interested in simply following the footsteps of the genre leaders by repeating what had already been done by superfluous retro-acts countless times before, so instead they just play this music straight from their hearts – and they do it well! Of course you will detect a lot of the typical Thrash Metal trademarks in their writing as well, but at least you can’t limit them to one particular band exclusively. The production is very solid and powerful, the musicianship very impressive and to my surprise the vocals get delivered by a female!!! When I listened to this album for the first time, I didn’t really had time to check out the booklet or infosheet and therefore wasn’t aware of this… and didn’t even notice that. Sylwia “Alkoholady” Papierska’s way of singing easily recalls classic Sabina Claasen, but occasionally also reminds me on Max Cavalera or early CRUMSUCKERS for the raw, growling edge of her voice. This is neither melodic nor ARCH ENEMY type stuff, just pure aggression, with a little punky edge to it, delivered in a quite astonishing manner, while the bandshot inside of the booklet visually pretty much recalls DÉTENTE to me (a tough blonde wearing sunglasses among a bunch a Thrashers)! There’s also two songs with German lyrics featured on the album (‘Thrash Alcoholisation’ and ‘Keine Eintracht’), but I suggest to avoid that in the future… Apart from the rather exotic pronounciation (another similarity to Max Cavalera by the way), they come across quite silly sounding (and I don’t mention this because of the band’s “weird” German)… Anyway, all in all this album pretty much surpassed my expectations and is highly recommended to fans of pure 80s Thrash. For more info check out www.thenomads.metal.pl or www.sharkrecords.de