With their third full length album in under a year, Coma Nova’s “The Hazard Album,” released July 17th, shows what might happen when artistic apathy takes control an album.

Before allowing that foreboding sentence to seize your eardrums, listeners and fans shouldn’t question the quality of the album—even if it requires a wary listen. Bouncing around between the genres of grunge, metal, surf-rock, classic-punk, and rap, the trio has produced their most eclectic (and lengthy, coming in at a healthy twenty songs) record to date.

That length provides plenty of listening enjoyment for those that are already familiar with the gritty, alt-grunge, fuck-you sound of Coma Nova,. While no-longer the four piece group with female lead that graced the cover of West Michigan Noise as of last year, the core trio of friends –Eli Kroes, Jake Marcus, and Matt Motzell (after a hiccup with another, now self-exiled drummer, who appears as The Professor on the album)–still remains.

The album wavers between 90’s grunge experimentalism and angered-rap apathy.  It starts off with a sludgy beat song “The Boggart” that straddles some wobbly line between metal and grunge. However, “The Boggart” does little to set the tone of the album. Sitting on a sound of garbling dark-matter, Coma Nova dissolves the volcanic guitar tracks in favor of a punk-rock anthem on the next track, “Nightmare Generator,” along to the frantically repeated lyrics “it’s alright.”

The genre-hopping occurs in bursts during the first half of the album, favoring punk trips during “Nightmare Generator” and “Showbiz,” followed by grunge-metal hybridizations like “Chains” and “Nazi Sympathizer.” While the diversion from a single focused genre can be distracting, it doesn’t feel forced; rather the band feels comfortable performing and experimenting within these genres that have built off of each other—taking a lick from here, rocking a graveling voice there, Coma Nova manages to make genre abandon a-ok.

But where abandon and absence of self-definition aid the band in the first eight songs of the album, a shift into rap—specifically of the “hate” variety, brings a questionable tone to the album. After a series of grunge tunes(or somewhere in the vicinity of the genre), listeners are smacked with the bands’ rap caricatures/alter-egos Sharks/The HATE Noise (Eli), Mean Gene (Jake), Anonymous (Matt) so much so that it feels  like a completely separate album.

In an interview, Eli ascribed the shift in gears, during both the first and second halves of the album, to boredom and apathy. “Once we’re done with one project, we’re sick of listening to all these songs we just worked on. We want to make something else at that point.”

Collaborating with other local artists The Wrap, DJ Gami, Dankstarr, and The Professor, Coma Nova creates a hip-hop narrative of gun-toting violence, physical abuse, white-trash, and homophobia.

Set to a catchy, upbeat, guitar riff, during “I Get Mad” Sharks slings rhymes about dealing cocaine and meth (nobody’s cocaine is whiter/ I bring mine across the border), drinking and fighting cops (last time I did some shots/ I got grilled by fifteen cops) all along to the chorus “I get mad, I get mad/ oh I get mad, gonna whoop that ass just like your dad.”

Most of the songs are provocative, past the point of braggadocio (when rappers rap about how great they are and how much other rappers/ individuals suck in comparison, specifically through rhyming). The last song of the album “Has Been For Years” features Sharks and Mean Gene claiming credit for blowing up the Twin Towers right alongside “gotta love fairies/ or not/ fuck that, fuck J.K. Rowling/ yo faggot, your boyfriend’s calling,” all set to Frankie Valie’s “Walk Like A Man.” Much of it seems to be Coma Nova just wanting a rise out of the listeners, Eli himself claiming that “some shit just seemed funny.”

Others are crude, such as “Future On The Road,” a song about truckers having gay-sex, along with a few chilled-out rap songs about smoking weed, like “Herb.” All of it is catchy, and well mixed—both DJ Gami and Eli are obviously talented producers, Eli handling all the in-studio production with Gami on all the live tracks, and they keep things crisp, almost allowing the polished rhymes to pass through without  hindrance.

However, for as catchy and well put-together as it is, its tone and content’s disregard for sensitive subjects will alienate many listeners. In an interview lead guitar and vocalist Eli described their intentions as “wanting to make fun of the things around us growing up: homophobic white-trash that shoot-off guns in the woods,” (as most evidently shown in the track “Fully Automatic Gun Addict”) and bassist Jake asserted that they “never wanting to offend anyone,” (a statement not as easily certified).  The message just doesn’t come across clearly on the first listen, and requires a few, heaping, handfuls of salt to get through without a resounding “fuck you” to the band—despite quality production, practiced experimentation, and a healthy confidence from the band itself.