Drawing you in is the little moments, where ambient music shines. Maybe it’s the way one note is sustained and lingers in the air; maybe it could be the hint of cello and viola that is interdependent through the record. All that matters is that the music maintains a spell over you, rendering the outside world nonexistent for a little while.
Deadguy is still fertile ground to excavate for modern metalcore bands. Take one listen to Colonial Wound’s first release Untitled. The vocals are similar but are still modern, adding a much needed update to this style of the genre. Degradation only ups the ante, bringing in more of a noise rock influence, not too dissimilar to Exhalants or Unsane.
Gulch and Sunami put out a split on Triple B Records. The pairing is the perfect summation of where hardcore is at in 2021. Those divisions that existed in the 90’s look really stupid in retrospect. It's all just glorified caveman music at the end of the day. All the different iterations on the genre are welcomed and even more so encouraged now.
I Had Everybody Snowed is a celebration for Skylar Sarkis, the songwriter behind the project Growing Stone. Its release date, November 30th of 2020, marked three years of sobriety for the musician. The seven year journey of conception to completion shows ten separate scenes, letting the listener come to their own conclusion.
Stay Gone, a record the band describes as five years in the making, sees the band leveling up, finally giving their songs the treatment they deserve. Everything is at the exact right levels. The guitars are huge and the vocals sound clear, but it doesn’t come at the expense of the drums, the instrument that is the driving force for the band.
The germination of An Unexpected Reality dates back to 2019, when the band was fresh off the release of their second record Deserted. At the time, writing a followup record felt like a daunting task, due to internal and external pressures. Instead, they decided to try a new creative exercise—make their version of Black Flag’s My War.
When Spectral Voice’s debut was released in 2017, they had five demos and two splits out in the world. By the album’s release they had perfected their concoction of death-doom metal. This strategy has not changed in the following years, part of what makes the Necrotic Demos compilation more compelling than it ought to be.
The ambition of Necrot is high and can be read as pompous going into the album cycle for Mortal: create a death metal classic. All the necessary components in the genre are here. The riffs are endless and plentiful; there’s plenty of blast beats to pound against your brain; and of course the lyrics deal in the particular tropes of nihilism.
Songs To Yeet At The Sun is the opposite of a cerebral experience. It’s instantaneous and immediate. You either get it or you don’t. If you want to do a deeper interrogation, all the lyrics are there for you on the Bandcamp page. Soul Glo is at its peak when the vocals become an instrument against the hardcore cacophony.
This wasn’t music you could dance to. If you tried, it would just look like a person high on caffeine, shaking and convulsing with no discernible rhythm. It trafficked outside of the predictable 4/4 rhythm. This was hardcore’s version of jazz music— frenetic and frenzied, with no care to what came before.
Vicious Nonbeliever, the newest release from Mal Devisa, is a natural extension of her previous efforts from a few years ago. By pairing up with DJ LUCAS, Devisa fully hones in her vocals, creating some of her best work to date. It’s really the turn of phrases that make Vicious Nonbeliever hard to escape or ignore.
An ape in midlife stasis; A talking bear; People in cocoons. On Magic Isn’t Real, the third album from Pile, surrealist imagery paints real crises - the feeling of monotony and parasitic relationships being just a few. While obtuse lyricism would be a defining characteristic for albums to come, Magic Isn’t Real was a defining moment in Pile’s discography.
Space Camp is all encasing, engulfing you in sounds of synth sludge. The breaks are minute, only serving to build tension for the stress inducing verses. These songs were never meant for hardcore kids who just want something to mosh to. It’s music that tries to address and navigate the experience of non-men, using inorganic soundscapes as its delivery system.
Quiet Moves makes their introduction plenty clear on their debut EP We’ll Understand When We’re Older. It’s emo revival that's aged a little bit. The pop comes through clearly throughout the entire EP. Certain guitar lines or vocal inflections will crawl their way into your subconscious. Take a listen and decide for yourself.
