Friction, 'Take It Or Leave It'

Sometimes you come across album artwork so sick and so silly that you have no choice but to smash the play button. Friction's seven-track Conditioned to Chaos features a cigar-chomping, guitar-wielding CN Tower tossing fireballs at a scorched city, a Toronto Raptor cradling (saving?) a streetcar and an anthropomorphized egg falling to its certain death. What it all means doesn't matter once you listen to "Take It or Leave It," a two-minute bruiser that heaves a hardcore groove with gruff bravado and subtle delay pedal riffs. The track is as catchy as it is circle-pit-stirring, only amplified by its back half, when a second vocalist adds a smeared sneer to the frontperson's swaggering bark.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.