Politics and hardcore go together like peaches and cream, and Boy Sets Fire are perhaps the best-loved exponent of politically and socially aware hardcore, bands like Fugazi aside. ‘Tomorrow Come Today’ is their first release through what is essentially a major, but they’re no less pissed off. Exhibit A: ‘Release the Dogs’; you won’t hear a more passionate song about America’s heavy-handed military action post 9/11 ("They’ve got their fingers on the pulse of our mourning with knives poised"). Exhibit B: ‘White Wedding Dress’; a shockingly potent tale of spousal abuse, with the key line, "They never come quite in time to see his fist".

The exhibits come thick and fast, each as righteous in spirit as the next, but ‘Tomorrow Come Today’ falls short of necessity on two fronts. First, there are only so many times you can write the same song, and Boy Sets Fire don’t really seem to have progressed from their last album proper, ‘After the Eulogy’. This leads us directly to the record’s second problem; recent releases by The Rise, Since By Man and Snapcase have proved that hardcore is a rapidly developing genre, no longer afraid to incorporate the extra facets made available by new studio technology. Boy Sets Fire are a very traditional-sounding group who will maintain their substantial fan base with ‘Tomorrow Come Today’, but are unlikely to add to it.