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FEW bands seem as sculpted for uncertain times as Slaves. Their new album, for starters, is called Take Control, and features a cartoonishly menacing figure in a balaclava, seen affixed around Bexhill on giant stickers before the show.

Inside, guitarist Laurie Vincent and howling, stand-up drummer Isaac Holman wore their established uniforms of opposing black and white.

But their brutal exertion meant curtains for Holman’s side of the bargain, and he soon had his top off, winding up an already frenzied crowd and venomously battering his percussive weaponry.

No wheels are being reinvented by this snarling Kent duo and many of their blink-and-miss-it tracks excel, to brilliant effect, in meaningless thrashing and devilish riffs.

One of their new songs, Rich Man, extended a furious finger to greed (“He sucks the marrow out of blood-soaked bones”).

It is, perhaps, their throwback, primal simplicity which makes them most unusual, attracting a baying teenage fanbase and, in the flanks, punk fans two generations their senior.

As both sections roared the ominous opening to old favourite The Hunter – “it does what it needs to to stay strong and to survive” – it felt like a pithy demonstration of rock and roll’s capacity for bleak, angry unification.