Kevin Bronson on July 28th, 2017

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Few groups in the music biz have a more head-spinning split personality than long-running L.A. quintet The Bronx. Flip the switch up, and they are the ironically named hardcore punk bad boys who launched their career in 2003 on a label (their own) called White Drugs with singles like “They Will Kill Us All (Without Mercy)” and “Bats!” Flip the switch down, and they are Mariachi El Bronx, the authentic, charro-suited Mexican folk band they started on a lark five years later. They even routinely flip the switch on a daily basis, having performed many times in each guise on back-to-back nights.

The hardcore guys resurface Sept. 22 when the band — singer Matt Caughthran, guitarist Joby J. Ford, guitarist Ken Horne, bassist Brad Magers and new drummer David Hidalgo Jr. (replacing Jorma Vik, who departed last year) — releases its fifth eponymous album, which, since they don’t bother with album titles, is destined to become known as “The Bronx V” or “BRVNX” And, well, it’s not like they’ve gone soft. Produced by Rob Schnapf and coming via ATO Records, “V” comes packing the full-throttle single “Sore Throat,” which sandpaper-throated Caughthran calls “a crime scene.

“[It’s] a triumphantly tragic story of a manic mind frozen in freefall,” he says. “The sonic smashing of your moral compass: ‘Let your reasons go / let your conscience be / mouth around your gun / now you’re finally free.’”

As for the rest of “V,” it’s no less pugilistic, and it finds Caughthran sharpening his lyrical chops. “It has the angst and social commentary that has characterized us from the beginning,”  Ford says, “only now the angst is aimed at more than just superficial things and the social commentary is directed at more than just people who like different music than us.”

||| Watch: The video for “Sore Throat”