Few things give me as much joy as shouty vocals, tappy guitar riffs, assymetrical drum riffs, the Northern Indiana DIY music scene, and pro wrestling. So obviously, Wrestling Moves, the debut LP from NWI post-hardcore group Native, hits me square across the chest.

Unfortunatley though, their tenure as a band coincided with a period where I was sort of divorced from the local-ish heavy music scene. I’ve only gotten into them in the last few years—and that was mostly through frontman Bobby Markos’ current band Cloakroom. While there’s not a ton of overlap between the doomgaze of Cloakroom and Native’s jagged, angular post-hardcore, this project has way more going for it than as a footnote for a more famous act.

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Across its thirty-seven minute runtime, Wrestling Moves offers a kinetic frenzy of stunning interplay, rhythmic changes, dramatic dynamics, and emotional catharsis. It’s an album of constant motion, even in its quieter moments. While each section is interesting on its own, the real magic is how they shift between them.

The end result is a compelling and passionate bit of mathy post-hardcore that lands somewhere between Drive Like Jehu, mewithoutYou, and early Minus the Bear. So…basically right in the center of my heart.