Quicksand Bring On The Psychics : Still Setting The Blueprint
More than thirty years after helping rewrite the rules of hardcore, Quicksand return with Bring On The Psychics. Older? Obviously. Wiser? Probably. Softer? Don’t bet on it.
Listening to Quicksand in 2026 creates an interesting problem.
You hear the bounce, the enormous bass, the collision between hardcore urgency and melody, those riffs that groove as much as they hit — and your brain starts making connections. Refused, Turnstile. Thursday. Deftones. Sparta. Except Quicksand were already doing this when some of those bands didn’t exist.
With ‘Slip’ and ‘Manic Compression’, Quicksand – led by Walter Schreifels (Youth Of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Rival Schools, Dead Heavens,…) – were among the bands that realised hardcore could become something stranger without losing its physicality. Slow it down. Add groove. Let the bass breathe. Bring in alternative rock, metal, dissonance, atmosphere and actual melody.
Thirty years later, that vocabulary is everywhere.
Which makes ‘Bring On The Psychics’ particularly interesting: Quicksand now operate in a musical landscape partly descended from Quicksand.
No pressure.
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The Circle Is Complete
Opener “Get To It” wastes approximately zero seconds reminding us why this band mattered in the first place. It’s urgent, muscular and absurdly groovy — the kind of track that could comfortably sit alongside today’s revitalised hardcore scene. You could say it sounds surprisingly contemporary. Or perhaps contemporary hardcore sounds surprisingly Quicksand. The chronology matters.
“Regenerate” follows with Sergio Vega’s bass doing considerably more than bass guitars are traditionally supposed to do, while Walter Schreifels and Alan Cage lock into that peculiar Quicksand combination of abrasion, melody and movement. And yes, Deftones fans will feel immediately at home. There are reasons for that too.
By the time “Agency” completes the opening attack, Bring On The Psychics has already travelled through roughly three decades of post-hardcore without sounding particularly interested in nostalgia. That’s the trick.
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NOT ‘SLIP N°II’. THANKFULLY.
Quicksand could easily have made the record everyone expects veteran bands to make: a carefully reconstructed version of their younger selves. They don’t. After its explosive opening, ‘Bring On The Psychics’ starts breathing. “Crystallize” and “Supercollider” drift towards alternative rock, shoegaze and psychedelia. “Days You Run By” stretches things further, revealing the atmospheric dimension that has always existed underneath Quicksand’s heaviness.
Is it less furious than 1993? Of course. It would be considerably stranger if it wasn’t. But ageing doesn’t necessarily remove intensity. Sometimes it changes where you put it. And whenever things threaten to become a little too contemplative, “Cool Guy” arrives with two minutes of concentrated Quicksand violence to reassure everyone that the furniture can still be moved. Balance restored.
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STILL MOVING
The most interesting thing about Bring On The Psychics isn’t that Quicksand can still sound like Quicksand.
It’s that they don’t seem particularly interested in proving it.
There are traces of Slip and Manic Compression, naturally. There is also the more expansive DNA of Interiors and Distant Populations. But this doesn’t feel like a legacy band carefully protecting its mythology.
In fact, perhaps we should stop talking about the “reunited” Quicksand altogether.
Since returning, they’ve made three albums. This isn’t archaeology anymore.
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Quicksand are simply a band again.
And ‘Bring On The Psychics’ sounds like one: occasionally furious, occasionally restrained, sometimes strange, always unmistakably themselves. More than thirty years after ‘Slip’, you can hear Quicksand’s influence across alternative and heavy music almost everywhere. That’s impressive. But the better news is that you can still hear Quicksand in Quicksand.
They helped write the blueprint. They just never agreed to stop editing it.
