Here at Revolver, we pride ourselves in living on the cutting edge of heavy music, from metal and hardcore to industrial and goth, and we try to keep you on the front line, too, by giving you a deep look at the innovative noisemakers poised to shape the sound and the scene. To that end, we've rounded up a handful of musicians who, we think, are on the rise across several different genres. From industrialized emo-punk to spine-tingling metallic hardcore, here are five artists you'll want to get on now.
POORSTACY
RIYL Bring Me the Horizon, HEALTH, My Chemical Romance
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE If you're pleased to see Y2K emo-core having a resurgence but can't stand the gutless pop-punk Machine Gun Kelly makes, then POORSTACY is for you. On his upcoming album, Party at the Cemetery, the South Florida renegade whips together ripping mall-punk and noisy industrial-metal, splashes it with glitchy hip-hop production and makes it all palatable with a multi-pronged vocal attack — throat-searing shrieks, anthemic punk wails and dead-eyed emo-rap croons. A product of the "I listen to everything" streaming generation, POORSTACY draws from his time in the Florida metal scene, his love for Rob Zombie films and his affinity for "emocore" acts like My Chemical Romance, AFI and Pierce the Veil — but he truly sounds like no one else around.
QUOTE Although his music pins him as an eclectic lover of art, POORSTACY strives to live by an ethos of radical individualism. "Don't listen to anything or anyone," he says. "Life is too short to live based on outer based perspectives ... I'm not here to be liked. I'm just doing what I want. Fuck your opinion about what I do or make. If it's not for you, fuck off." That isolationist perspective is a reflection of who he is as a person — "I'm kind of antisocial and don't like being in crowds" — but he certainly knows how to make a lasting impression. "One time I passed out in the crowd and got carried to my green room."
MouthBreather
RIYL Car Bomb, Boundaries, Jesus Piece
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE MouthBreather are a band from Massachussets who make bone-snapping, brutish metalcore that's infused with whirring mathcore licks, eerie alt-metal cleans and zany tempo changes. Whereas most bands pick one of those two directions to lean into — either mathcore eccentricity or ignorant mosh — MouthBreather distuingish themselves from the heard by including all of those sensibilities on their long-awaited new album, I'm Sorry Mr. Salesman. Its cover art of a freaky demon creature with a gaping grin does a better job at selling the record's chaotic appeal than any description ever could, but just know that whether you need beatdown soundtracks or virtuosic flair, MouthBreather has you covered.
QUOTE "The closest thing we have to [a mission statement] is 'keep it punk,' though our music is not punk," the band of few words say. "We don't have any rules ... especially no expectations or rules in the studio. If we like a part, we put it in. If the song is done, we stop playing." As for influences, they say The Used, Boards of Canada, Underoath and Suck My Christ — a seemingly non-existent group — are their favorites. When it comes to their shows, it sounds like they have an "anything goes" mentality. "[The craziest moment was] when our friend Abe got bodyslammed into our merch table during a contest of sorts." They didn't elaborate on "of sorts." Hit a MouthBreather show to find out.
Lurk
RIYL Drug Church, Angel Du$t, Wire
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE LURK are a band full of punks making pop music. Formed after frontman Kevin Kiley, bassist-vocalist Dan Durley and drummer Pedro Unzueta decided to move on from a previous project, the group put out a demo in 2017 and an EP the year later that filtered the energy and immediacy of punk through the catchiness of classic pop melodies, and their upcoming album, Around the Sun, takes everything up a notch. Songs like "Crack a Smile" and "See-Thru" verge on exploding into puck ruckus before ultimately drawing back and dialing into earworm choruses, while a song like "Pressure Points" places rowdy post-punk howls over chunky power-chords that crunch like a pile of autumn leaves. Whether you're a hardened extreme metal fiend or someone with a soft-spot for songs that stick, LURK will get ya humming along.
QUOTE "At the start, I think we were just craving to make something different with more energy," Kiley says of their origins. "We wrote our demo in basically two practices and it immediately just felt natural and fun." For their debut LP, the band wanted to fully embrace their wide-ranging influences and channel them into writing the catchiest melodies they could muster. "On the punk side of things, we might pull from bands like Wire, Devo, B-52s, Stooges, but we try to incorporate a lot of different elements and sort of package it in a raw, punk way. There's classic rock, shoegaze and even some soul elements in these songs. There are parts where I can try to pull some kind of Curtis Mayfield thing vocally or Dan will dial in a McCartney sounding bass tone."
Porcupine
RIYL Nails, Converge, Jesu
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE They say don't judge a book by its cover, but you should absolutely judge Porcupine's 2021 EP, The Sibyl, by its horrifying cover art — these songs are fucking grim. The Chicago quintet formed a few years back from the ashes of a local screamo band, and Porcupine combine that genre's harried emotionality and vein-popping intensity with hulking metallic hardcore riffs and the spastic energy of powerviolence. Think of Full of Hell and Nails at their heaviest crashing into the arty, heart-on-sleeve pathos of Blacklisted and Dangers. Then, The Sibyl ends with a trudging doom-gaze closer that recalls Jesu and King Woman, leaving you with a lingering sense of spine-tingling uncertainty about what it is you just heard.
QUOTE "The guys in this band are relentlessly creative and listen to a huge variety of music," enthuses drummer Brian Clancy. "Post-punk, dream-pop, shoegaze, black metal — all of us have something we love and want to [incorporate]." Their musical influences run the gamut from Mastodon and Converge to Sam Cooke and Tears for Fears, but their lyrics come from a different medium. "My lyrics are heavily influenced by literature," says vocalist Dawson Kiser, who cites goth-rock poet Nick Cave as his biggest inspiration. "I was reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Suttree while working on The Sibyl and I find his writing dark and gruesome, yet beautiful and sublime." To round out the The Sibyl's full aesthetic, the band used an image of an ossuary full of skeletal remains to draw newcomers in. "For art, I really wanna capture something that is so dreadful that you are fascinated with it," guitarist-vocalist Joey Hernandez says.
Eyes of Perdition
RIYL Despised Icon, Xibalba, I Declare War,
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Over the last few years, we've begun to see musicians who came up on deathcore start unabashedly bringing those influences into hardcore, and Eyes of Perdition are a prime example. This Las Vegas wrecking crew formed in 2019 shortly after frontwoman Lindsay O. moved to the city, and their debut EP, Incendiary Truths, is an infernal brew of chuggy deathcore, monstrous death metal and the absolute heaviest elements of beatdown hardcore. By ignoring technicality to focus all of their energy on evil mosh parts and forceful grooves, Eyes of Perdition are easy to smash faces to but surprisingly hard to categorize.
QUOTE Before she eventually found Bolt Thrower and went down the death metal rabbit hole, O. grew up listening to hardcore bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag, and she says Henry Rollins "truly saved my life." "I needed someone like him when I was young, and he gave me the armor, the inspiration and the motivation to continue to be the best version of myself," she says. Clearly, Rollins' persuasive messages of empowerment have even made their way into the inward-facing subject matter on Incendiary Truths. "Working through your darkness and using the wisdom that comes from confronting your shadow to empower yourself," is how she describes the lyrics. However, the band has one mission statement: "To make people afraid to come to our shows," O. says, using the phrase "dirty and uncomfortable" to describe their live energy "We want to be as abrasive as possible and as unpredictable as possible."
