Violent Ritual is the third EP from Los Angeles’s Personal Damage, originally released on a small run of self-released cassettes in 2022 and now upgraded to vinyl courtesy of Sorry State. Violent Ritual offers five tracks of Personal Damage’s trademark snot-fueled, short-fast-and-loud hardcore punk, the longest track clocking in at a mere 80 seconds. While the songs are short, they’re hardly insubstantial, packing albums worth of excitement into each delicately constructed and tightly wound composition. Violent Ritual is the most potent dose yet from one of the 2020s’ most exciting hardcore punk bands.