Vegan Salad’s latest release, a self-titled full collapse simply called Vegan Salad, emerged in characteristically disputed circumstances.

According to the band, the record was named only after all other title proposals were rejected, forgotten, misheard, or denounced as “too narrative.” Early working titles allegedly included No Gods No Croutons, Wilt Condition, Bagged and Bitter, and one unprintable phrase involving a farm shop and the end of history. In the end, the band settled on the self-title not out of confidence but deadlock: nobody could agree on anything else, and by that point the argument had already lasted longer than most of the songs. The finished record contains nine tracks in a total runtime of 1 minute 54 seconds, which by Vegan Salad standards qualifies as both a statement and an indulgence. It is less an album in the conventional sense than a rapid series of ideological blunt-force events, each one arriving, detonating, and vanishing before the room has adjusted. Titles such as “Don’t Cry Over Spilt Milk,” “Foot Pain,” “Fuck Reform,” “Existential Anguish,” “Fuck Landlords,” and “Squirrel Freedom” suggest the usual Vegan Salad mixture of political disgust, bodily irritation, class resentment, ridiculous specificity, and humour so dry it feels abrasive to the touch. The longest track, “Fuck Landlords,” runs to a staggering 22 seconds and has already been described by at least one listener as the band’s “prog era,” while “Punch a Nazi” and “Be Healthy” continue their long-standing method of reducing broad moral and social imperatives into short-range hostile impact. If Nothing Fresh Survives felt like a fully formed document of rot, Vegan Salad plays more like a concentrated aftershock: shorter, dumber, and somehow even more committed to the principle that no song should survive long enough to become comfortable.