Fury

At the apex of Fury’s short and startling rise, from a providential birth in late 2013 through era-defining performances at America’s Hardcore fest in 2014 and 2015, the Orange County five-piece has delivered Paramount, a debut full-length album of grace, erudition, and effortless virtuosity that guarantees Fury’s induction into the tiny fraternity of epochal hardcore bands — e.g., Embrace, Unbroken, Mental — in whose sonic singularity and aesthetic intelligence the best minds of successive generations have seen themselves reflected. Paramount is impossible to characterize in the usual terms of A-meets-B direct influence: maybe you hear Burn, maybe you hear Outburst or Beyond or Supertouch, but no combination of such references conveys the subtlety of the songwriting, the precision of the musicianship, or the ferocity of Jeremy Stith’s vocal performance, by way of which one encounters the best written and most cleverly phrased hardcore lyrics in recent memory. Paramount is, as they say in the groves of academe, sui generis. And yet to apprehend the lyric sheet’s overt intertextuality (no less than Shakespeare, Don Delillo and Praise’s Andy Norton, among others, are given co-writing credit), to hear the multiplicity of guest vocalists, to spend the 12 minutes required to read the voluminous thanks list — all this is to know, as the band itself surely does, that Paramount belongs no more to the individuals who recorded it than to the entire roiling, loving, terrifying, inspiring, hateful, romantic, literate, ignorant, fantastically dynamic culture that gave rise to it.