There are few things more irritating than a band being criminally overlooked, particularly when said band has spent the best part of four decades demonstrating precisely why it deserves considerably more respect. Step forward Xentrix, Preston’s finest purveyors of British riff-based belligerence, who return with Allied With The Enemy, an album whose title sounds less like a marketing exercise and more like a formal declaration of war against stupidity, complacency and anyone who thinks thrash metal should have grown up, bought a cardigan and settled quietly into middle age.
Following 2022’s Seven Words, Xentrix have returned with their seventh studio album, and the evidence suggests a band not merely content to revisit its past but determined to sharpen the knives, reload the ammunition and make a thoroughly unpleasant noise about the state of the present. This is thrash with muscle, intelligence and a welcome absence of reverence for anybody’s expectations. No desperate attempts to sound young, no embarrassing flirtation with fashionable production tricks, and absolutely no suggestion that the band has misplaced its appetite for musical violence.
If anything, Xentrix sound like men who have finally decided that politeness is a thoroughly overrated virtue.
Recorded across late 2025 and early 2026 at Backstage Studios in England, with Andy Sneap once again behind the production desk, Allied With The Enemy benefits from the involvement of a man who understands that metal should sound heavy, rather than resembling a collection of household appliances being thrown down a staircase. Sneap’s production style brings clarity, definition and considerable force to the proceedings, allowing the individual instruments to punch through without sacrificing the collective impact.
The guitars are the principal executioners, naturally, but the crucial ingredient is the band’s understanding that speed alone is no substitute for songwriting. Riffs need shape, rhythms need purpose, and aggression needs somewhere to go. Xentrix have always understood the value of a well-constructed thrash song, and their latest material continues to demonstrate that a little compositional intelligence can make an awful lot of noise considerably more satisfying.
The album’s lyrical concerns are equally combustible. Disinformation, blind popularity, social disintegration and the human capacity for self-deception provide the ammunition. In an age when every half-informed opinion is elevated to the status of revealed truth by somebody with a smartphone and an alarming lack of self-awareness, Xentrix have discovered a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material.
‘Rip Saw’ opens proceedings with precisely the sort of no-nonsense aggression its title promises. This is Xentrix in their natural habitat: sharp-edged thrash, delivered with the assurance of a band that knows a good riff is worth more than a thousand guitarists desperately auditioning for an endorsement deal. This is one of those rare opening tracks that delay you listening to the next track. Your writer listened to this at least four times before moving on to the equally excellent title track.
‘Allied With The Enemy’, is the obvious centrepiece. Selected as the album’s lead single despite being one of the last songs completed, it encapsulates the record’s combination of muscular riffing, sharpened melodic instincts and lyrical suspicion. That a late addition should ultimately become the album’s calling card suggests that Xentrix have retained an important creative instinct: knowing when a song has something extra, and having the good sense to follow it. The result is a fitting mission statement for an album that refuses to settle for merely competent brutality.
‘Killer Unknown’ and ‘On Burned Remains’ promise further opportunities for the band’s darker, more confrontational side to take centre stage. The latter is among the album’s standout cuts, reinforcing the impression of a group increasingly comfortable with its own considerable weight. Xentrix need neither to outrun the competition nor to bury their songs beneath gratuitous technical excess. They know exactly where the throat is, and they know how to aim.
Then there is ‘Nil By Mouth’, another key advance release, whose title alone carries an appropriately withering suggestion of enforced silence. Against an album preoccupied with misinformation, popular delusion and social decay, it sits neatly within the wider thematic picture. It is an especially apt expression of Xentrix’s enduring appeal: metal that attacks the intellect as readily as it batters the eardrums.
‘Doomsday Hook’ deserves particular attention for the interplay between melodic detail and outright aggression. The guitar harmonies provide welcome contrast without diluting the band’s ferocity, demonstrating that melody in thrash need not be an embarrassing concession to accessibility.
‘The Dark Eternal’ offers a different shade of darkness, drawing on the more expansive, emotionally charged side of traditional heavy metal. It provides contrast within the album’s broader assault, while retaining the sinister atmosphere that binds the record together.
Elsewhere, ‘Where The Madness Lies’, ‘Snake In Waiting’ and ‘No Bridges Left To Burn’ reinforce the album’s sense of gathering unease. The titles suggest a landscape of mistrust, psychological instability and scorched-earth consequences, perfectly suited to a band whose best work has always combined aggression with a keen eye for the uglier aspects of human behaviour.
The current line-up — Jay Walsh on vocals and guitar, Kristian Havard on guitar, Chris Shires on bass and Dennis Gasser on drums — brings together the ingredients for Xentrix’s present-day incarnation: experience, technical assurance and an evident desire to keep moving forward.
There is no need to manufacture a grandiose narrative about redemption or reinvention. Xentrix have spent years negotiating the vagaries of musical fashion, line-up changes and the peculiar British habit of producing excellent heavy bands and then acting surprised when somebody overseas notices them. Their current trajectory is less about reclaiming some imaginary throne than proving that the music itself still has teeth.
And it does. Plenty of them.
There is a temptation to describe veteran metal bands in terms of legacy, influence and their place in some imaginary museum of extreme music. Xentrix deserve better than that. Their importance lies not simply in what they contributed to British thrash decades ago, but in their continuing ability to make the form relevant without stripping away the qualities that made it exciting in the first place.
Allied With The Enemy is a statement of intent from a band with unfinished business. Its aggression has direction, its melodic instincts have purpose, and its lyrical concerns possess a welcome degree of bite.
British thrash has never lacked for worthy contenders. What it has occasionally lacked is the recognition that should accompany them. Xentrix remain one of the genre’s most persuasive arguments against that historical oversight.
So, if you prefer your metal intelligent without being sanctimonious, brutal without being brainless, and seasoned without smelling faintly of mothballs, Allied With The Enemy should be firmly on your radar.
Donnie’s Rating: 9.5/10 – best thrash metal album of the year. No question.
Allied With The Enemy is out on 30th October via Listenable Records
