Active Slaughter – You Bastards!

Artist: Active Slaughter

Title: You Bastards!

Release: LP / Digital

Year: 2026

Label: Grow Your Own Records

Active Slaughter are one of those bands I’ve been following since their beginning in the early 2000s. The band’s five-track debut EP, Smash HLS, came out in 2002 and took a militant animal liberation stance against Huntingdon Life Sciences, Europe’s largest contract animal testing corporation. But while there have been many vegan hardcore and punk bands singing against animal use and abuse, Active Slaughter’s frontman JJ Maguire was involved in the SHAC campaign (Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty), in which he and several other SHAC activists received prison sentences after one of the largest UK covert police operations of its time, involving hundreds of officers, spying, and surveillance resources.

Most of the tracks from that first EP were later featured on the band’s album ’Ave A Butchers, which expanded their lyrical scope. Even if Active Slaughter were never the most original or groundbreaking punk band, I felt influenced by the fact that they were not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. Due to these circumstances, the band initially disbanded in 2010, but they got back together in 2016 with a new lineup that included Mark Stone, bass player from Liberty, and Trystan O’Connell, guitarist from Lost Cherrees, both important ’80s anarcho-punk bands with a strong antifa and animal rights message.

In 2017, the band released some new tracks, including the anti-Zionist song “It’s Not Anti-Semitic To Hate Fascists,” which were later featured on the 2019 album Set The World Alight? through Grow Your Own Records. Notice how the band addressed the topic well before October 7th. Now, Active Slaughter are back with their new album You Bastards!, bringing eight new tracks of pro- direct action anarcho-punk in the vein of bands like Riot/Clone, Conflict, and Liberty. It’s classic, working class punk, in the vein of all those bands that traded the experimental approach and melancholic post-punk vibes for more direct punk rock influences and catchy, sing-along choruses. The production is once again handled by the band’s own guitarist Trystan at Infernö Class Recörding, who we interviewed last year.

Lyrically, You Bastards! is exactly the kind of furious punk rock broadside you would expect from this London band. Dedicated to Active Slaughter’s sadly lost bassist Mark Stone, this record is the band’s declaration of resistance and their unwillingness to separate one form of oppression from another, distilling the band’s message into three main points: Human Rights, Animal Rights, and Free Palestine.

“Blue Lights Flash” opens the record with anti-police anger, addressing deaths in custody and systemic racism, while “Doomsday Clock” and “The Meek Shall Inherit the Dearth” tie environmental collapse to greed, war, fossil fuels, and ruling-class indifference. The remaining tracks turn their rage toward the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Tory corruption, NHS privatization, far-right scapegoating, and the familiar theme of vivisection.

Boycotting products, choosing alternatives,

Spreading information

Are ways of saving animals’ lives

Protest, resist, don’t be intimidated

If they label you a “terrorist”

Remember, you can be the ALF

The new track “Smash MBR” is actually a remake of the old “Smash HLS,” with MBR referring to the MBR Acres facility in Cambridgeshire, where roughly 2,000 dogs are bred annually for laboratory animal testing. The site has been the focus of high-profile animal rights protests, open-rescue missions, and an ongoing, long-standing permanent protest camp called Camp Beagle.

What makes You Bastards! an important punk record is not some innovative riffing or genre-bending, but the band’s total lack of compromise. These are protest songs in the old sense, written to name the bastards, reject despair, and fight back through resistance, boycotts, street action, animal liberation, antifascist struggle, and solidarity with the oppressed.