rue – sprig of rue

Vancouver’s rue debuted in 2025 as a quartet formed partly from members of drive your plow, a band known for its anxious, dynamically shifting emoviolence. While both projects share personnel and a similar scene background, rue abandons that restraint in favor of something far more immediate and aggressive.

Their debut album sprig of rue, released via No Funeral Records and mastered by Will Killingsworth, condenses grindcore, powerviolence, and hardcore into a brief but punishing 16-minute burst. Across nine tracks, the record rarely allows space to breathe, blastbeats dominate, guitars oscillate between jagged hardcore riffs and thick distortion, and the vocals remain locked in a constant state of strain.

Despite its extremity, sprig of rue is tightly controlled. Tracks are short, often around a minute, and even the longer moments rarely feel indulgent. The band understands when to escalate and when to cut things off entirely, giving the record a precise, almost surgical pacing rather than pure ferocity.

“Seven stars” and “at the grave’s mouth” are rare deviations from the constant velocity, opening with sludgy, weighty riffs before collapsing back into blast-driven neocrust structures. Even here, the shift is temporary, the songs continuously fold back into speed and rupture rather than developing into separate ideas, thus reinforcing the record’s refusal to settle into any single mode for long. The latter is merely a feedback-laden interlude with a sample looming for one minute before taking us back to audial carnage.

Sprig of rue doesn’t feel like a set of songs so much as one compressed blast of tension. Brief, volatile, and deliberately unrelenting, but never careless in its execution.