Prong is being hailed as the successor to the Metallica throne, and rightly so. This New York hardcore trio is like a big, lumbering beast – guitarist-vocalist Tommy Victor, bassist Mike Kirkland and drummer Ted Parsons deliver an industrial crunch that can dust your senses in seconds. Even the hallowed Metallica has never been this brutal.

Force Fed, Prong's 1989 album, was something of a setup for Beg to Differ, it allowed you to peer through the window of a dank and scary place. Beg to Differ dumps you inside, slams the door shut and leaves you cowering in a corner with rubble falling all around you.

Prong's musical approach is a schizophrenic minimalism; the band pares its songs down to skeletal form and then grafts meat back onto the bone. Stark hardcore battering rams like "For Dear Life" and "Beg to Differ" are laden with teasing snippets of melody. Biting harmonics and flashes of feedback creep into the dirges ("Your Fear," "Prime Cut") to brighten their plodding bleakness. Demented rhythm changes lurk within the songs like jack-in-the-boxes – they spring up and shock you to attention every time you're about to get comfortable.

The lyrics are every bit as jarring, if sometimes incoherent. Victor, the band's primary writer, spews out his nihilistic observations with a guttural harshness; the world he depicts is shallow, greedy and utterly corrupt. Prong's quest to expose the gloomy side of life extends even to its covers; included on the CD and cassette is a vìcious live version of "Third From the Sun," by the nightmarishly doom-struck underground band Chrome.

Beg to Differ is like a sonic war zone, and Prong is a Sherman tank of a band. Let it roll over you – internal injuries never felt so good. (RS 577)

KIM NEELY