*“They wanna restrain me,” recites Honor Titus in the introduction to “On the Run,” the first track on the first album by the Brooklyn hardcore punk band Cerebral Ballzy. And then, over needling guitar and drums, this:They wanna punish and torture me,
They wanna cleanse me of my so-called belief
I’m just a young kid but I know what I want!
I don’t want to be like them.
I refuse to be like them!
I find myself constantly confronted with their failures!

Perfect taunting, hyperventilating self-martyrdom. The words — and then the sounds, when the song takes shape — seem totally 1982 to 1984, when American hardcore had not yet shaken hands with metal and was beginning to resemble one unbroken continent of loud-and-trebly bass lines, double-time breaks and identical drum fills, with word-stuffed shouts in short time-windows about skateboarding, school and cops! (There were two great songs in that period called “Police Brutality,” one by Urban Waste and the other by Necros, both under a minute and 10 seconds!) A close reading might say this music reflected the hysteria of its own artistic repression: the songs kept saying they didn’t like rules, but the bands obeyed so many of them!

Close readings are for cops! This band likes beer, drugs, skating and jumping turnstiles. (Band logo: a skeleton in a shirt buttoned to the top, wearing a flipped-up baseball cap — the cholo-style dress code of early Suicidal Tendencies — and extending a skeletal middle finger. A button on the shirt reads “Hard to the Coors.”) Doesn’t like the idea of school: “Going nowhere fast/and cutting class.” (From “Cutting Class.”) Needs space: “You don’t know what’s best for me and I do/and even if I don’t I’ll find out soon.” (From “Don’t Tell Me What to Do.”)

Mr. Titus is the right man for this job: you can’t pin anything on him. His strangulated cry mulches phonemes and petulantly drags the last word in a line; sometimes he drifts into flamboyantly slack vowels that seem way more West Coast surfer than East Coast skater. You don’t have to know what he’s saying, and you can’t unless he wants you to. He knows how to lose control perpetually and yet sing rhythmically against the backbeat.

He sounds like a chaos orchestrator — the sound of his voice alone can get people moving in the wrong direction — and he’s the best part of this adrenalized fecklessness. Among other contemporary hardcore bands, you’re going to get more state-of-the-art speed and sharp turns from Trash Talk, more focus and swing from Off! Enjoy it. Don’t even think about taking it seriously.”