Their music paints a picture that is all too close to being all too real, with powerful and often disturbing pictures. These guys are never gonna end up on your grandma’s list of favorites, but they might help to open the eyes of the kids who are being manipulated by media and government like so much silly putty. Again, I’m talking about the lyrics. Poignant and abrupt, most often all too truthful, Nuclear Assault puts it on the line. For instance, look at the lyrics to the classic “Brainwashed”---“Moronic sit-coms and one-sided news alter your feeling give you conformist views/ Why can’t you get that garbage out of your head?/ You’d be better off to read a good book instead”---that’s what I’m talking about, man, something to stimulate the old gray matter. Who ever said that rattleheads couldn’t formulate decent ideas for themselves?

     On the flip side of all their seriousness, these guys are a lot of fun. They truly believe in what they are doing and are not just in it for the money like so many other people who are going to the speedy side. This is their life. They practice the subversiveness that they preach.

     The vision that bassist Danny Lilker had after he left Anthrax was of a band that could play blindingly fast and would redefine the parameter of its genre. By mixing the melody of metal that he knew from Anthrax and the street anxiety and social anarchy of hardcore that he gained during his stint with the Stormtroopers of Death (or S.O.D. for those who can’t figure it), Nuclear Assault was the beginning of a megalithic monster whose bastardized origins birthed the New York metalcore movement.

     Through constant gigging and underground circulation of their two demos, Nuclear Assault soon became the headlining crowd pleasers on their circuit. Not only could this band brave the depths of the longhair metal contingent at Brooklyn’s famed L’amour, but they could satisfy the legions of skinheads that make up the hardcore crowd in Manhattan’s equally famous CBGB

     In the old days, you could pick any Sunday of the month, and if they were in town you would see them out at CBGB supporting the new up and coming hardcore bands, hanging out in the crowd with the people they felt the closest to. You wouldn’t find any of that “Joe-rock-star” attitude with them, and if you tried to dish it out, you’d have been surprised. These guys took no shorts and had no patience for poseurs.
     The original line-up of bassist Danny Lilker, guitarist John Connelly, guitarist Anthony Bramante and drummer Glenn Evans released some of the hardest crunching socio-political, yet humorous songs the scene had ever seen. Classics such as the Brain Death ep, The Plague ep, Game Over, Survive, Handle With Care, and Out of Order. But Lilker left Nuclear Assault after the release of Out of Order to form Brutal Truth.
      I started doing Brutal Truth full time,” begins Lilker. And that lasted until ’98. Then a couple of guys weren’t getting along, so it kinda fell apart. But right around then, S.O.D. started doing shit seriously again. We did our second full-length record finally. We did a whole bunch of shows in places we never played before. That was a lot of fun. But that kind of fizzled out by around March 2000.”
     He had settled into a life of domesticity with his new wife, Heather later that year, and didn’t really want to tour. But little did he know what was in store when he answered a call from an old friend.
      “I got a phone call a year ago,” says Danny, “from Eric, from Candy Striper Death Orgy, who’s the biggest Nuclear Assault fan in the world. And he said, ‘Hey would you consider doing a show with the band?’ I said, ‘Yeah, what the fuck. Why not?’ And it turned into this. It all kind of blossomed into doing a bunch of shows.”
      ”We played the March Metal Meltdown in Jersey (in 2002), relates Lilker. “And Anthony did a few shows of that – Anthony, the original guitar player – but he couldn’t hang. He told us when he first started, ‘Look, if this is about a show here and there, I can do it. But I can’t commit to going out and touring again.’ You know, his dad’s ill. He’s got a good high paying job. So we have a guy named Erik Burke now. He’s from Rochester, where I live now. And he’s very talented and he’s doing a great job with it. And all the people that have seen us that have posted on the Internet message board said that he fit right in. And, you know, they couldn’t tell he was the new guy or anything. So, it’s ¾ of the original lineup. If I may be so bold as to say, probably, you know, the ¾ that--it’s going to sound mean--but you know, that matter the most. We did the best we could and it’s actually better now with Erik, to tell you the truth. He’s actually a stronger guitar player. And we don’t have to listen to him bitch and moan all the time.”
      After getting the line-up firmed up, the new Nuclear Assault mounted some small tours to get their road legs back in preparation for the promo tour for their new live album that was recorded in May 2002 for Screaming Ferret Wreckords.
     “We started doing a couple of weekends,” elaborates Lilker, “little weekends--the mini tours in the northeast that we could go home from. We played from Texas out through Albuquerque, Phoenix, and then to California and up the west coast to Seattle. So it wasn’t like a full tour, it was a mini tour, but it was still kind of extensive. You know we did a whole bunch of fucking driving that’s for sure.”
     It seems that Nuclear Assault are just one of the many hard metal acts from the ‘80s that are regrouping, putting themselves out on the road, and recording new material. Part of this wave can be attributed to the discovery of their music by the children of the people who were part of the scene then, and to the “everything old is new again” cycle that hits each decade making whatever was popular 20 years before the new, hot thing. So what does Danny think of the resurgence?
     “It’s cool,” he comments. “As long as it’s survival. “As long as it’s not just doing it because everybody else is doing it. I’ve been asked that question a lot. Kind of like “So a lot of bands are doing it. Are you still coordinated?” I think some bands get inspired seeing other bands doing it, and they go, ‘Cool, those guys can do it. We can do it.’ The joke I make is that everybody’s sick of that rap metal shit, and they just want to fucking thrash. So, I guess we have to just dust off our shit and show ‘em what metal is supposed to be like.”
     Yeah, that’s the New York way of looking at things. Beware of those who don’t possess the hunger and the drive of the streets. Nuclear Assault has it, and that’s what makes them so damn good. Point blank.