As lo-fi becomes increasingly absorbed by the mainstream, the hipsters have to find newer, less crowded pastures. That the tag has been applied to pretty much any artist on last.fm who’s ever dared to use distortion, it’s far from being properly understood. That anyone has applied the term to Mi Ami is almost beyond belief. A genre made up of artists that mostly can’t be bothered to clear up the quality of their recordings could never have a place for a band with the passion and intensity that have made the San Franciscans one of most exciting acts on the planet.2009’s Watersports was a statement of intent by the band. With two members having been a part of Black Eyes, they’d managed to transfer the energy and ferocity of their former outfit over, but translated it in an entirely different way. With their follow-up, Steal Your Face, they've taken everything that made them so great and have refined it in their own inimitable way. It all still sounds vaguely tropical, but utterly furious, whilst the use of repetition thankfully remains core to their sound.As a listener, it scarcely gives you room to breathe, despite the fact that only one of the tracks ”“ 'Secrets' ”“ clocks in at under 5 minutes. It’s something akin to sensory overload ”“ they cram so much into a song so subtly that it’s difficult to decipher. The best thing to do is simply let it wash over you ”“ singer Daniel Martin-McCormick’s tribal squawking coming as close to incomprehensible as possible, whilst the music underneath touches upon everything from noise-rock to punk to metal.Having a listener, at times, feels almost irrelevant to the band. This is 37 minutes of music designed to give you motion sickness, drilling you with an unbelievable array of sounds. The third track, 'Dreamers', offers some form of respite, slowing down the pace after the openers have utterly demolished you, but it’s still far from anything you’d usually hear. The fact that they haven’t been copied yet is probably down to people being completely unable to create anything close to this sort of lunacy. There are no contemporaries that come close to replicating this sound, so removed are Mi Ami from normality. The elements of math-rock mean that, at best, you could describe them as being Battles raised by savages.Whilst elements of it may feel as though the band are simply jamming, the further in you look, the more intelligent you realise this is. There are fragmented riffs hidden beneath layers of purposeful distorting, rhythms within rhythms ”“ Steal Your Face is essentially a puzzle without a solution. There’s so much energy put into every second of every one of their tracks that it’d be a crime not to give this record a chance ”“ even if it will risk giving you a headache.