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 doom, grindcore, shoegaze 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.
No/Más - "Exile"
Between the new Wormrot album on the way, the Big Takeover hardcore festival in Richmond being headlined by Terrorizer and this new No/Más single, 2022 is shaping up to be a great year for grindcore. "Exile," the first taste from the D.C. band's debut on heavy hardcore powerhouse Closed Casket Activities, is a face-mauling onslaught that never gets bogged down by repetition, switching between a different type of blasty sprint or bullet-spraying death-metal riff every 10 seconds.
Greet Death - "Panic Song"
Greet Death's songs have always been play-by-plays of depressive low-points, written with an unvarnished specificity that suggests the words we hear Logan Gaval and Sam Boyhtari sing are exactly what fell out of their mouths during their emotional crises. The Michigan band's latest gets meta about that approach, a literal "Panic Song" that was conceived during one of Boyhtari's 5 a.m. freakouts and molded into a chipper, gazey pop-rock tune, personifying the love his partner showed that pushed him back from the ledge that night.
Absent in Body - "The Half Rising Man"
As Absent in Body vocalist Colin van Eeckhout puts it, his new band recounts the age-old story of "humanity destroying itself," but the Amenra singer's group — also featuring ex-Sepultura drummer Iggor Cavalera and Neurosis guitarist-vocalist Scott Kelly — are all about showing instead of telling. Plague God's eruptive closer, "The Half Rising Man," is a profoundly dark, physically descending pummel of obsidian guitar rumbles and rhythmic cacophony. You know, like the sound of civilization ending, one meteoric collision after another.
Dream Widow - "Cold"
Dave Grohl came from the hardcore world and proved his metal fluency nearly two decades ago with his shortlived Probot project, but we still didn't think he had a metal album this good in the tank. His self-titled debut as Dream Widow (the lore is complicated) touches on everything from death-metal and thrash to sludge-metal and doom, and standout "Cold" resides on the latter spectrum. Sure, it sounds like Corrosion of Conformity and Down, but it actually sounds as good as those bands, not like a gutless imitation. Bravo, Dave.
Midwife - "Send the Pain Below" (Chevelle cover)
Self-proclaimed "heaven metal" artist, Midwife, has a peculiar talent for transposing rock songs millennials grew up hearing on the radio into haunting, spectral shoegaze creations. Last year, she unexpectedly flipped the hook of the Offspring's "Gone Away" into an eerie ballad, and now she's completely re-arranged Chevelle's alt-metal banger, "Send the Pain Below," into a wave of misty post-metal that sounds at once a million miles away and like it's playing from inside your own chest cavity.
Bodysnatcher - "Wired for Destruction" (Feat. Lorna Shore's Will Ramos)
Florida's Bodysnatcher specialize in mosh music of the hardcore-tinged deathcore variety (think Kublai Khan, Varials and the Acacia Strain), and their new single "Wired for Destruction" fits right in that pocket. It's the perfect soundtrack for practicing donkey-kicks to, just one hulking chug riff after another and two vocalists who split the difference between the genres it fuses — a drummer with a more hardcore-ish bellow that contrasts nicely with frontman Kyle Medina's earth-rumbling low growls.
