There was a terrifyingly brutal impact to Killing Joke’s second single, whose pounding rhythmic blitz evoked the end of the world. The hard-edged, Ladbroke Grove-based disrupters were convinced nuclear annihilation was just around the corner – if anything the ominous groove of A-side ‘Wardance’ might help usher it in, abetted by the distortion on frontman Jaz Coleman’s half-ranting vocals and a bassline beamed in from another planet. Recorded in a tense session, with the band routinely screaming demands at untried engineer Phil Harding over the mixing desk, ‘Pssyche’ was its perfect bedfellow. Equally dense and unstinting, it addressed street tensions and a barrage of societal ills as Coleman’s paranoid musings coiled around Geordie’s slashing guitars, Youth’s driving figure and Big Paul Ferguson’s unconventional heavy-heavy drums. But there was nuance too. In the genuinely disturbing last verse’s evocation of Nazis, rapists and priests, Coleman offsets the startling accusation “You’d wipe out spastics if you had the chance” with a pungent disclaimer of Christian guilt. It cemented Killing Joke’s theatrical and threatening image, achieving the band’s brief of creating “sounds from a primeval world”.