Here at Revolver, we're always on the hunt for new songs to bang our heads to — indeed, it's a big part of our jobs. With that in mind, here are the tracks released this week in hardcore, death metal, noise-rock and more that have been on heavy rotation at Revolver HQ.
For your listening pleasure, we've also compiled the songs in an ever-evolving Spotify playlist.
Gatecreeper - "Caught in the Treads"
It's been a minute since we've heard a true-blue death-metal song by one of the era's greatest true-blue death-metal bands. Gatecreeper's 2021 mini-album, An Unexpected Reality, was a My War-indebted split down the middle between savage grind and doomy death.
This new single, "Caught in the Treads," is just good ol' combat boot death metal. A tad more stadium-scaled than Gatecreepers' older stuff, its giant riffs and marching beat almost bringing to mind Amon Amarth. But it's still coated in the band's preferred film of HM-2 distortion — and Chase Mason still growls like an ogre.
Couch Slut - "Ode to Jimbo"
So much of today's noise-rock is stale, formulaic, and pitifully un-subversive. Not Couch Slut. The NYC muck-slingers evoke what it must've felt like to see Lydia Lunch howling in the face of art-punk rigidity during late Seventies.
Frontperson Megan Osztrosits has an unparalleled knack for recounting traumatic life experiences with a tantalizingly awkward blend of brutal candor and dark-as-night humor. "Ode to Jimbo" paints a slurry mosaic of drunken excess, and the music violently crashes down the stairs, tumbling and bloodying the floorboards — yet somehow still sticking the landing.
Sematary - "Headlights"
On his brilliant January single "Wendigo," eccentric rapper Sematary (who recently toured with $uicideboy$) deviated from his Chief Keef-ian witch-house sound and took a stab at pulsating post-punk. It fucking ruled, but so does "Headlights," where he veers back to his beat-bumping comfort zone.
Don't bother searching for wisdom in his lyrics. Sematary's music is all about conjuring the vibes of entering a haunted house on bad acid. His words sound like they're being chosen in real-time, selected more for their syllabic pleasure and rhyme-scheme repetition than anything else.
Antichrist Siege Machine - "Sisera"
Antichrist Siege Machine are pretty much in a league of their own right now. Very few bands are successfully blending fiendish noise with ferocious power in the way this blackened-death duo are.
Their 2021 album Purifying Blade was psychotically heavy, and "Sistera," the first taste of their next LP, is equally mind-rattling. It's loud, its torturously caustic, but what makes this band stand out is that they groove too. There's no reason why fans of Nails, Full of Hell and the wider Closed Casket Activities universe couldn't get down with this.
Final Resting Place - "Chaos Collected"
Final Resting Place are a mysterious new band who just dropped an EP on Daze called Prelude to Extinction. It's unclear who plays in the group, but the members supposedly hail from New York and Maryland, two states with rich histories of brutal, mosh-able death metal.
And that's exactly what "Chaos Collected" sounds like. The band playfully marked the release date on streaming services as 1995, and if you didn't know otherwise, you'd think this raw, shoddily-produced, relentlessly evil track was released during the same era that Suffocation and Dying Fetus were entering the scene.
Alcest - "L'Envol"
It's been five years since Parisian blackgaze pioneers Alcest released an album, and Les Chants De L'Aurore will change that. Its lead single, "L'Envol" is a promising preview.
The eight-minute climber finds the enigmatic band leaning into their post-rock tendencies, painting tall-as-trees soundscapes of shoegazy guitar plumes and skyscraping "woah-oh" vocals. Pretty as ever, but it still packs a punch.
