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 gore metal, rap punk, progressive deathcore 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.
200 Stab Wounds - "Gross Abuse"
Ohio gore-fiends 200 Stab Wounds get ultra-nasty across the whole of their new Manual Manic Procedures album, but there's a particularly venomous, yet anthemic quality to its third groove-wretched single, "Gross Abuse."
That dangerously ascending chorus riff almost plays like a mid-Western death-metal take on Alice in Chains' "Them Bones," while the rest of the song's razor-trilled menace determinedly spiralizes us into a putrid pool of goo. As guitarist-vocalist Steve Buhl puts it: "I want your blood… it's not enough."
Amira Elfeky - "Remains of Us"
Amira Elfeky brings a profoundly haunted and fully mesmerizing kind of longing to her latest nu-gaze single, the artist's first release since delivering the staggering Skin to Skin EP in the spring.
Though lilted softly against layers of dream-crunched guitar heaviness, her lines on desire ("you're everything that I want") and determination ("I sail away to wherever you are") are max-impact. The single also marks Elfeky's first-ever collaboration, with shoegazing one-man band Scarlet House, who brings pastel taupe moans and screams to the slow-drip piece.
Ho99o9 x Boys Noize - "OFF THE METER"
Ho99o9's new collaborative single with German electronic artist Boys Noize bursts into your brain with fevered intensity. That's in part due to the bassy, jackhammering kick drum the latter brings to his streamlined, but savage production work. For Ho99o9's part, the rap-punk duo's TheOGM sounds particularly depraved as he slow-drawls out guttural body horror on the hook, or casket-closing braggadocio in a late-song verse.
While it's called "OFF THE METER," everyone here seems in-sync enough to fuck the rest of us up.
Nathan James - "BLOODHOUND"
Nathan James sniffed out some memorable heaviness with his Chain Gang this time around.
On "BLOODHOUND," the rising singer-rapper mixes up his flow — from post-mortem croaking to an incandescent nu-metal croon — while "chewin' through the bone" of some bad interpersonal dynamics. All the while, his band are in dogged pursuit of a bad-to-the-bone breakdown — which kicks off with an especially on-point pit-starter mosh call from James.
"Sick 'em," indeed.
Uniform - "This Is Not a Prayer"
Heaven help us, Uniform are back, and the bruising NYC industrialists go for the throat on this first particularly punishing preview from their upcoming American Standard album.
It definitely passes muster for the longtime noisemakers, with the relentless, drum-rumbling paranoia coming out of a pair of dueling percussionists setting the stage for a daunting six-minute epic of psyche-fracturing guitar dissonance, corrosive bass fuzz, and Michael Berdan's ever-terrifying gargoyle growl.
The Dali Thundering Concept - "Nobody"
The Dali Thundering Concept vocalist Syvail Conier uncomfortably turns the mirror on a lot of us with the self-centered consumer narrative of the French progressive deathcore troupe's scathing, and supremely hammered-down, "Nobody."
Above djent-scarred breakdowns and quick-pivot assaults, the frontman screams as someone fully aware of the corporate gluttony and ecological devastation going on around them, yet who remains complicit if it means a sick new smartphone is just around the corner: "Why should I care about a little slave labor if it makes our shit cheaper?"
Biting stuff.
