Bloodsports channel urban tension on debut album Anything Can Be A Hammer
New York noise rock quartet Bloodsports have released their debut album Anything Can Be A Hammer (October 17, 2025) via Good English Records. Recorded at Studio G Brooklyn and produced by Hayden Ticehurst, the album delivers a potent mix of noise rock, post-punk, and orchestral punk that thrives on tension and release. Across nine tracks, the quartet—Sam Murphy (vocals, guitar), Jeremy Mock (guitar, synth, mellotron, organ, dulcimer), Liv Eriksen (bass, vocals), and Scott Hale (drums)—channel the turbulence of urban disquiet into something brutal yet strangely beautiful.
Produced by: Hayden Ticehurst
Anything Can Be A Hammer is an album that revels in contradiction. Its sound is both jagged and melodic, dense and deliberate. Bloodsports harness distortion and angular guitars as emotional weapons, crafting songs that feel equally urgent and calculated. Producer Hayden Ticehurst captures this energy with precision, allowing each instrument to cut through the chaos while maintaining a sense of looming collapse.
Highlights from the record showcase Bloodsports’ evolving balance between abrasion and atmosphere. ‘Calvin’ merges slacker rock indifference with a searing undercurrent of tension. ‘Come, Dog’ trudges with oppressive weight before exploding into cathartic feedback, while ‘Rosary’ blends dissonant guitar lines with hypnotic rhythm work. By the time the title track arrives, the band has pushed its sonic endurance to the edge—fragile, yet unyielding.
Throughout the album, Bloodsports finds “solace in the capitulation of sonic strain,” where angular sedition blends with economical melodies that lighten the load of the self-destruction that these songs embrace. It’s a record that feels deeply physical—alive with motion and abrasion—but also inward-facing, exploring the emotional fatigue and obsessive introspection of Murphy’s lyricism.
The band recorded the project in November 2024 at Studio G Brooklyn, with Meredith Okamoto assisting on engineering, and Dan Millice mastering. The resulting album is both deliberate and volatile, a portrait of a band refining their craft while refusing to sand down their rough edges. Critics have likened their sound to Swans, Unwound, and Sonic Youth, yet Bloodsports’ voice feels distinctly their own—restless, cerebral, and charged with unease.
With Anything Can Be A Hammer, Bloodsports turn disarray into design, matching explosive instrumentation with lyrical vulnerability. It’s a debut that doesn’t just capture the chaos of modern noise rock—it humanizes it.
Anything Can Be A Hammer is available now on all streaming platforms.
Standout Songs: ‘Come, Dog,’ ‘Calvin,’ ‘Rosary,’ and ‘Anything Can Be A Hammer.’
Release Date: October 17, 2025
6.8
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