Style: Grindcore, deathgrind (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Cattle Decapitation, Napalm Death, Chelsea Grin
Country: Australia
Release date: 28 November 2025

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You never quite know where life will take you, eh? The chain of events that led to me reviewing The World Is Not Yours began on a sweltering day in Melbourne, Australia at a heavy metal choral workshop. While vacationing down under in 2024, I had the chance to sit in on several rehearsals with Melbourne’s Heavy Choir, and I’ve since kept tabs on their choirmaster, Alana K—a vocal coach whose résumé includes work with bands like Ne Obliviscaris—via social media. She appears here as a featured vocalist on The World Is Not Yours, the debut full-length album from Munt, and so I find myself back on the other side of the world, in the grip of a Canadian winter, sitting down to pen this review.

Munt self-describe as a blackened grindcore band, and they’re true to their word, delivering compressed extremity in the vein of Cattle Decapitation or Napalm Death. While violence is part of their aesthetic, it’s rendered with precision rather than chaos: tightly performed, professionally produced, and not relying on low-fi abrasion or shock for shock’s sake. The result is a polished yet punishing sound; The World Is Not Yours is a tastefully engineered pummeling. In keeping with the bite-sized barbarity of grindcore, tracks like “The Lies That Bind” hurtle forward with breakneck momentum before grinding to an abrupt, often unannounced halt: there’s no time to get comfortable. This sense of careening motion is animated by Jared Roberts’ relentless battery of the drum kit, which functions as the album’s central engine, driving riffs into the red.

According to the credits of The World Is Not Yours, vocal duties are shared amongst Munt’s members. While I’m not sure of the exact division of labour, the vocal delivery is versatile yet cohesive across a fully harsh spectrum. Never lingering in one register for long, they range from gnashing, guttural low end (see the end of “Dominion”) to a furious, spittle-flecked mid-range with impressively crisp enunciation, to menacing half-spoken, half-growled passages like the intro to “The Lords of Excess”. Featured vocal performances, such as the aforementioned Alana K’s strident high-toned shrieks on “Cruelty and the Condemned”, shade the palette of brutality even further.

Spud Robertson and Sol Laskowski’s guitar work is similarly dynamic. At times, they seethe up in an excoriating, acidic boil as on “Dominion” or album closer “Noose Dragger”. Elsewhere, they deploy sinisterly weighted riffs that churn forward with menacing force, like something half-formed being dragged up from the mud of Mordor. Locked tightly into the drum kit’s forward lurch, the guitars nonetheless seize the occasional chance to unspool in gesticulative solos as in “A Duel of Fractures” before snapping back into step with the beating machinery of The World Is Not Yours. 

Grindcore is, by necessity, a sprint and not a marathon, and Munt seem keenly aware of this. They muscle their way through the 39 minutes of The World Is Not Yours with considerable power, rarely allowing the energy to flag. The exception is the intro and interlude tracks, which bluster with standard-issue apocalyptic cacophony—sirens, shouting, industrial clatter—over a low, ominous thrum. While these interstitials are thematically in line with the album’s atmosphere of unrest, they ultimately feel more obligatory than illuminating, like they’re gesturing toward cohesion without deepening it.

Lyrically, The World Is Not Yours treads a bleak, nihilistic landscape, landing on grindcore’s familiar socially-conscious terrain. Fixations on control, societal erosion, and moral vacancy recur throughout the record, reinforcing a worldview that is desolate without tipping into caricature. What ultimately caps the impact of The World Is Not Yours is not a clunky execution or a lack of competence, but a failure to push beyond established parameters. Though the floor is consistently high, no one track or moment is especially daring or transcendent, nor do Munt meaningfully evolve their constituent genres.

On The World Is Not Yours, grindcore’s brevity, violence of motion, and refusal to linger are all wielded capably. Heard from thousands of kilometres away, the album’s fatalistic, ferocious unrest feels no less immediate for the distance it has travelled. Munt’s vision survives the crossing intact—not as a radical reimagining of the form, but as a disciplined and effective expression of it—proving that this kind of compact fury speaks fluently across borders and climates alike.

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Recommended tracks: A Duel of Fractures, Cruelty and the Condemned, Noose Dragger
You may also like: Malignancy, ByoNoiseGenerator, Knoll
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Munt is:
– David ‘Spud’ Robertson (guitar, vocals)
– Sol Laskowski (guitar, vocals)
– Tim ‘Mothlord’ Richmond (vocals)
– Ronnie Dixon (bass)
– Jared Roberts (drums)
With guests:
– Matt Budge (vocals)
– Alana K (vocals)