Give Me Dirt
The title track off Cancer Bats' eighth album crystallizes a year on the road into a riff that sounds like it wants dirt under its fingernails.
By Song Reviews · August 21, 2026
The title track off Cancer Bats' eighth album crystallizes a year on the road into a riff that sounds like it wants dirt under its fingernails.
Give Me Dirt the album is a travel record in the truest sense — a year on the road distilled into something that’s as much about leaving cities behind as it is about processing loss and reckoning with environmental collapse. The title track is where that whole idea crystallizes: a riff that sounds like it wants dirt under its fingernails, and a chorus that reads almost like a mission statement for the record around it.
Cancer Bats have never been a band chasing polish, and “Give Me Dirt” earns its grit honestly. 7.5/10 — a band nearly 20 years in still writing like they mean it.
Hero image: Cancer Bats performing at Groezrock, Belgium, 2015, by Achim Raschka, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.