Next year, the San Francisco hero-metal squad Slough Feg will celebrate their 25th anniversary, a benchmark that means founder and sole anchor Mike Scalzi has spent more of his life in the band than out of it. When Scalzi talks about Slough Feg, he often refers to the sacrifice and discomfort it has necessitated--living in the poor parts of an expensive city, working multiple jobs to cover the lifestyle, generally eschewing the responsibilities of middle-class Americans entering their fourth or fifth decades. "That's how I've been able to focus on it: by not having that kind of life by giving up the opportunities for a life that a lot of people want," Scalzi told Metalsucks in 2010. He was 40. "Kids, wives, houses, mortgages." But age hasn't stifled Scalzi: These songs overflow with two-guitar pirouettes and resplendent hooks, dynamic surges and appropriate aggression. In fact, as Scalzi's voice continues to deepen and slow, the maturity becomes an asset for some of Digital Resistance's more surprising moments. During the hitman confession "Habeas Corpsus" (that extra "s" emphasizes the serial nature of the narrator's work), Scalzi sounds a bit like Nick Cave, his brooding and low tone backlit by sweeping acoustic guitars and drums that shake like the nervous knees of the guilty. "Curriculum Vitae", fosters a psychedelic trance, with a pinwheel of bright guitar tones and textures sparkling atop a basic march. The song is an end-rhyme octet, where each line is a complaint lodged against the dumbstruck and pixel-faced: "Amidst the burned-out minds/ Automatons and mimes." Scalzi stretches each disappointed line into its own concerned chorus, multi-tracking his voice so that every criticism feels like a populist gripe. And that's been the thrust of Slough Feg all along: to make grand, fist-in-the-air heavy metal, fit for lighters or cell phones and sing-alongs. Digital Resistance might be older and wiser, a transmission from a lifer, but that not a quest out of which they've aged.