Recently I was chatting with a friend who I don’t see often enough. We had just eaten Italian sandwiches the size of our heads and were sprawled out across a couple couches in my living room, giving our bellies the space they now so desperately needed. In a fugue state perhaps brought about with marinara, hot peppers, and veal cutlets we got talking about what authenticity is and what it means to live authentically.

The discussion on authenticity circled well-tread talking points– sticking to well-defined core values and navigating a world where non-conforming authenticity is often punished. One point he mentioned far more eloquently than I ever could that a key part of living authentically is allowing and helping others live authentic lives of their own. To quote some post (on Twitter? on Tumblr?) floating around in my head: “If you want to be a part of a community, you have to be willing to be a villager”.

Alicia Cordisco has been the embodiment of authenticity in metal communities both mainstream and underground for longer than I’ve been a metal musician. Ferociously unwavering in her morals and ethics and unbelievably prolific (especially in the past few years), she has lived her life in defiance of the shitheads and bootlickers, channeling the power of metal protest music in one sub-genre or another.

The Recreant marks Alicia’s further push into the denim-and-spike-clad world crust punk and crossover thrash. I say further since her anarchist death/ thrash band Transgressive released a cover of Aus-Rotten‘s “Fuck Nazi Sympathy” on the first of their trilogy of 2025 EPs Remember Us to Death. Obviously no stranger to the genre as a fan, Alicia uses The Recreant to continue exploring this genre on the project’s 2026 debut album The Code is V… Outlive The Code.

Okay, first thing’s first. Since Allie is undoubtedly a realhead and cut from the same wear-your-influences-on-your-sleeve cloth as I, the nod to Napalm Death‘s killer 2005 album The Code is Red… Long Live The Code does not go unnoticed around these parts. Beyond the title format, the font used on both album covers is about as close as you can get, as well. This may seem like just some small, inane detail, but it’s one of those things that gets me excited to crack into an album. When little references like this make their way into underground art I know it was made with passion and fervour. With authenticity. You put that shit in there because you want to, be cause it’s something you want to see, and something you stand by. I’ve talked to my own bandmates about this, putting in little nods and references to works that influence us for the one-in-eight-thousand people who might actually notice and get excited about it. In a world flooded more and more every day with a deluge of smoothed out, corporate slop designed to make you feel as ambivalent as possible, little flashbangs of personality like this are so affirming and energizing to see.

By my count, Alicia’s output last year alone totaled 3 Transgressive EPs, an album under her own name, and a new Wraithstorm single, so to see another full length album come out where she helms the project’s songwriting, lyric writing, and leads its operations is frankly, dizzying. As someone who makes music myself, I’m always curious about the workflow of others and how they maintain momentum. I’ve been a friend and a fan of Alicia’s for a good few years now and seeing her add The Recreant to her portfolio of riff-slinging projects, trust me: you will get quality and quantity.

The opening seconds of The Code is V… are reminiscent of Transgressive‘s sampled intro on “Thirteen Twelve”, lampooning idiot cops (redundant descriptor) before the band kicks in. Immediately, as the lumbering basslines and saturated, old school overdriven guitars take over, you get a sense of this album’s presentation. Fast. Loose. Pissed the fuck off. I want to be clear and precise with my use of the word loose. It’s not sloppy. Allie is an accomplished guitar player who holds herself to high enough standards that implying she’d release something sloppy is insulting. But considering this album’s roots in crossover thrash and crust punk, I see the looser playing as a stylistic choice, and one that adds to the whirlwind of outrage that The Code is V… offers up.

Riffs on this album swing between low string chugging thrash riffs that would start a pit in a snap-instant, and rise up to ’80s hardcore style power chord progressions for choruses or interstitial sections between vocals. There’s an intangible quality to the guitar playing– you can easily visualize the poor guitar strings, assailed by a ballistic picking hand hammering down on them. Breaking up the more traditional crossover riffing are moments of heavy-metalisms, the intro to “Compliance to Z72.52” sounding like it could easily have come off any seminal Finnish death metal album from between 1989 to 1991 and the semi-titular “V Coded” bringing an undeniable heavy metal swagger with some overt melodicism woven in to the rhythm guitars for the first time in the album.

These energetic instrumental performances back up typically solo prog-thrasher Ruby Rockatansky‘s absolutely frenzied vocal delivery. I’d never heard Ruby’s music or vocals before The Recreant but goddamn this girl’s got pipes. Most of the time she sits in a mid-range bark but has the chops and range to dive into truly guttural territory and back up to a searing high vocal fry that wouldn’t be out of place on early Scandinavian extreme metal releases. The pissed-offedness of this album is apparent by the riffing, yes, but Ruby’s vocals really present The Code is V…‘s lyrics plainly with one firm middle finger up (the other hand is clenched in a fist, cocked back, ready to send your nose cartilage back into your skull).

The versatility of Ruby’s voice augments the myriad of lyrical subjects tackled on The Code is V… and while this album is fucking angry, that anger is honed to a razor edge, a weapon used to swing at transphobia, neoliberalism and idle centrists, abusers and rapists, and atrocities against queer folks in the United States prison systems (see: V-Coding), one after another. This could very easily have become an unfocused and less affecting rage if these lyrics were penned by a more amateur hand, but reading through Alicia’s lyrics as Ruby spits them out shows a fury that, unfortunately, can only come from someone who experiences these injustices and cruelties first-hand.

If there’s one person I can say lives authentically, it’s Allie. And if there’s one person I can say pushes others to live authentically, it’s (surprise) also Allie.

She is more than just one who suffers at the hand of a draconian system and its perpetrators. In the near-half-decade that I’ve known her, she has always been a light for people, someone who unabashedly looses rallying cries for others to join her cause and to help lift each other up and fight back against the fascists and those who would see marginalized people trampled under boot-heel.

The album’s opener lays this underpinning of hope and push to action for the listener, opening with:

We’re stronger together
You can’t do it alone
Survival is resistance
You’re not on your own

And ending it’s final verse with:

Get up off your knees
It’s time to join hands
Stand against the oppressor
And give back this land

Be fucking angry, and do something about it.

All this leads us to the only question that matters:

Is it Sick?

Yes.

The Code is V… Outlive the Code was released on February 9th, 2026 and is available on The Recreant‘s Bandcamp page and vinyl can be ordered through their Elastic Stage profile.

The Context Zone™️

In addition to the album reviewed above, I also listened to the following music to try and get a bit more context for this release and/ or to cultivate the right headspace:

• Transgressive – Extreme Transgression (2023)
• Napalm Death – The Code is Red… Long Live the Code (2005)
• Aus-Rotten – …And Now Back to Our Programming (1998)
• Aus-Rotten – Fuck Nazi Sympathy (1994)
• Ruby Rockatansky – The Estrogenesis Initiative: Althaea and Synthia’s Quest For Romantic Vengeance Against a Vile Authority (2024)