100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #9 Gallows – In The Belly of a Shark

Released: 2007

You don’t have to be a music listener for too long realise that it’s the most cyclical art form going; give it a decade and whatever your niche, it’s bound to meet itself coming back the other way again. Take for example the hardly revelatory opinion that with Green Day’s Dookie, punk had squared it’s own circle from originally being a Situationist pastiche of rock n’ roll, an in-joke made up in a sex shop, to a corporate staple one nose ring away from being the establishment.

Whatever, by the mid-00’s it’s head was being paraded around the world on a spike by god-awful bands such as The Offspring and Blink 182. Something needed to change, and because the cycle determines that it will, it did. Along came Gallows.

Founded in the cultural desert that is Watford, their heavily-tatooed singer Frank Carter sounded like a hand grenade going off inside a mineshaft, whilst their debut album Orchestra of Wolves had the effect of putting 20,000 volts up the dead movement’s rectum. Suddenly the grandmasters were relevant again – it was notable the quartet’s choice of covers included Black Flag and The Ruts – and as the album’s brutal peak, In The Belly of a Shark was a hardcore nightmare that felt like being bitten in half. Chosen by the cycle, Gallows were now punk’s apex predators – and they were going to need a bigger boat.