A quick follow up to the excellent Friendship Music LP, You Don’t Exist finds Surfbort doing that gnarly, nihilistically fun that they do so well. Each of the four tracks is built around the classic hardcore sonic template. Fittingly, these tracks sound live, even if they are not.

Riffs are as catchy as they harsh, with the band bouncing between crunchy attacks and Dangerhouse style charging. Singer Dani Miller’s presence is undeniable. At once she’s a person gone berserk and a person who has calculated her exact situation and crafted the perfect pick axe to use against annoyances. “New World Hoarder” is beautiful in its simplicity with Miller ranting against a hoarder for the sake of ranting against a hoarder. Some of the tracks seem to be metaphors for bigger issues and some seem to be about issues so simple, or even mundane, they become abstract pieces that work on whatever angle you the listener infuse them with.

Miller is fantastic at providing a line here or there and letting you color in the lines. On “Dicks” she howls out in her cracking voice, “Treat me like you want to be treated/you’ll never know what its like to be cheated!” she could be talking about a romantic relationship, a social one, or even politic, and the lines fit into any frame. It’s due in part that she delivers with a raw, confident delivered, as colored by an agitated nerve. I believe her if only because she seems so self assured in her the place of her words and doesn’t feel the need to give me the specifics. Really, this is what most great music does and what most music in general fails to do. Plus, it helps that the music rips as well.

It’ll be hard for Surfbort to best Friendship Music if only because that record was a perfect encapsulation of what the band is. Still, as this EP shows, there’s plenty more fire where that came from.