Dope Debut EP Out Now by Vietnamese Hardcore Punk Band 9XACLY!!! [Vietnam]

Duuuuuuuuddddddeeeeeee…this is the shit that pumps us beyond ALL belief! Check out Vietnamese hardcore punk band 9XACLY who add all sorts of elements to their sound so that every track remains completely unpredictable. You’ve got straight up hardcore punk, thrash, rapcore, and a ferocity in the vocals that isn’t all cookie-monstered out. There are tracks that have a 90’s metallic hardcore vibe, tracks that have an early 00’s rap-metal/rapcore vibe, and tracks that are more modern-day TUI/Turnstile sounding as well. But it’s those crazy sick vocals that we keep coming back to with repeated listens. The screaming feels like the vocalist literally will fall apart if he doesn’t get these songs out of his being immediately. DOPE.

As it’s the band’s debut EP as well, the production on this is beautifully raw – the way it should be. The guitars aren’t drenched in high gain – actually, it almost sounds like there’s zero gain and it actually makes the riffs sound HARD as hell. With this type of production, what it actually does is makes everything sound more frantic and chaotic.

Luckily, the band was kind enough to give us some background to themselves and this release in particular.

UA: When did the band form and what are the main influences?
It was a tough time during the Covid pandemic where the entire city of Saigon was in lockdown. We weren’t allowed to leave our homes and this continued for a period of 6 months. It felt like literal hell for all of us. During this time, many of us started to learn new instruments and began experimenting with stuff with no real purpose, just for fun and pass the time until everything became normal again. And then suddenly in early 2022 we all met up again and decided to try something more hardcore punk-sounding and keeping it fun and creative. After several jams we wrote a bunch of cool demos but weren’t sure what “genre” it was so we just came up with the band name 9xacly – which is chính xác in Vietnamese which means “exactly”.

UA: What are the songs about on this EP?
All songs are sung in souther Vietnamese – lyrics and pronunciation. Actually, the accent of our dialect has a rich and dynamic tone musically and contains many attitudes when speaking normally which we found really interesting so we incorporated all that in our lyrics. Because of that spirit, our lyrics mainly are about the normal feelings or thoughts of a youth, yelling it out loud and straight. 

UA: What is the last song about? It sounds like maybe a pop punk cover song?
The last song is not a pop punk cover haha. Vietnam has strict censorship in art and culture, so basically it is just a pop and beautiful song with filthy and nonsense lyrics as our way to counter this censorship. 

UA: As a band, what is the goal for 9XACLY?
Goal? There is a lyric in our song “Giai điệu là sự tự phát” which means “rhythm is spontaneous”. So we just hope that we can take all of the best parts of ourselves out put it in our music and keep it natural and wild.

https://www.facebook.com/9xacly