Fighting Mad is a one-man project run by Tomppa from Denmark. He regularly puts out new songs under this name on Bandcamp, and the result of the first phase of his work from 2024–2025 is this demo, released by Nonkonform Media. Stylistically, we’re in skinhead rock’n’roll territory, mixing early punk, Oi! and a touch of pub rock inspiration. Take old Slade, early British Oi! and punk completely free of hardcore influences, and this is pretty much what you end up with. It’s slower-paced music focused on the message, built around uncomplicated but fairly catchy song structures, without trying to show off or add unnecessary complexity.
We kick things off with the hit City Of My Own, which is a classic confession about how we can love the people from our city while hating its streets at the same time. It obviously depends on whether you’re stumbling home from the pub with the girl you picked up there, or walking to work in the dark early in the morning. It’s a complicated relationship, after all. CTRL+Obey deals with the way the meanings of words change, which is, of course, something particularly familiar from the world of politics. Another beautifully constructed track with obvious hit potential is Yesterday’s Ghost, dealing with how the time we have actually slips through our fingers and how quickly everything around us changes. There’s a certain simplicity to it, but also an ability to say something immediately understandable to the listener.
On the second side, we continue at the same pace, although the songs here feel slightly more similar to each other. We start with Love To Hate, dealing with the black-and-white way of looking at the world. Glass And Gravel and Death From Above are both mid-tempo tracks with a strong emphasis on guitars. The former tells a somewhat more poetic story about rebellion against the establishment, while the latter deals with the madness of war coming down from the skies. There’s no unnecessary complexity here – just straightforward songs built around riffs, rhythm and a clear message.
And now for the controversial part, so nobody can later accuse me of hiding anything. Tomppa was previously involved with the Finnish band The Wrongdoers, which isn’t a project I followed, simply because it was, in my opinion, too closely connected to extreme politics. I’m not going to judge it here or dig any deeper into that particular subject, but I think it’s fair to say that this side of the scene completely passes me by – just as RASH bands such as Opció K-95 do on the other side of the political spectrum. I’m interested in music for street delinquents that doesn’t contain elements of extreme politics, because I have no intention of spending my life surrounded by bullshit that, in my opinion, is complete nonsense.
I don’t know Tomppa personally and I have no intention of judging him either. Fighting Mad doesn’t promote any form of extreme politics, and I think it’s important to separate the music itself from the things that have historically turned the skinhead scene into a battlefield and, to outsiders, something of an incomprehensible mystery. In fact, I feel that this is exactly what Love To Hate is about, and that’s also what makes this record interesting to me on a slightly broader level. Black-and-white thinking is precisely the mechanism that can divide a scene into several irreconcilable camps, even when they may actually have much more in common musically than it might seem at first glance.
So, all in all, we have six tracks in a rock’n’Oi! style, somewhere between The Templars or The Veros mixed with early Slade. Solid singalong vocals, a slower pace, guitar-driven arrangements and a traditional sound with no hardcore influences. Nothing overcomplicated, no attempt to sound modern or extreme just for the sake of it. In my opinion, this is a very good demo from a project that knows exactly what kind of sound it wants and sticks to it from beginning to end.
TOP TRACKY: City Of My Own, Yesterday’s Ghost, Death From Above
