Split Chain
RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE Deftones, Loathe, Hum
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Since debuting in the spring of 2023, Split Chain have racked up more than 10 million streams with less than a dozen songs. You can credit this impressive early achievement to the quintet’s super-catchy nu-gaze sound, which merges vocalist Bert Martinez-Cowles’ earnest, emotionally-charged crooning with the melancholic heaviness of A-game Deftones (then again, they recently subverted groovy expectations with a knuckles-up cover of Type O Negative’s “I Don’t Wanna Be Me”).
The band are currently holed up in a Devon, U.K., recording studio making their debut album for Epitaph Records, and they have their first North American tour coming up soon with Silverstein. It’s already looking like 2025 is going to be off the Chain.
QUOTE Split Chain’s recent leg of European dates with GEL marked another major highlight for the U.K. group, but they admit things spiraled out of control when the bands celebrated the end of the tour at a Karaoke bar in Wiesbaden, Germany.
“We took over the whole bar,” drummer Aaron Black recalls. “Bert almost got kicked out for singing Creed on the tables. Sandy from Grove Street was driving for GEL, and watching him try to round us all up to leave the bar was chaos — like watching a farmer struggling to herd sheep. And that’s when Bert picked up the owner of the karaoke bar as if they just got married.”
Aversed
RIYL Arch Enemy, Dark Tranquillity, the Agonist
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Guitarist Sungwoo Jeong and bassist Martin Epstein formed Aversed in their freshman year of high school and promptly staged a series of lunchtime concerts in the cafeteria for their classmates. They’ve been serving up tastily frenzied, high-protein melodic death metal ever since, but their forthcoming album, Erasure of Color, comes with a twist: It’s the band’s first full-length release with cleans-and-screams phenom Sarah Hartman on the mic.
QUOTE The epic music video for Erasure of Color’s melancholically-blasted “Cross to Bear” single was partly shot outdoors, as Hartman waded around two different lakes in the Metro Boston area. The vibrantly-colored scenes of the singer howling underwater, however, nearly flooded out an Aversed member’s basement.
“The underwater shots were accomplished using a fish tank Sarah found on marketplace… and later sold for a small profit,” guitarist Alden Marchand explained.
“We had cameras above and below the tank, and the band took turns drowning Sarah by pushing her head under the water, which was not at all indicative of our feelings towards her. Filling up and later emptying a 40-gallon tank propped up to head-height was much more of an ordeal than we anticipated. Let’s just say the lawn and basement floor were well-watered that night.”
Múr
RIYL Gojira, Opeth, Orbit Culture
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Most of Reykjavik, Iceland, quintet Múr met while studying at a local music school, where they built up their jazz chops and jammed on their favorite metal songs. Over the years, they modeled themselves into Múr by writing a series of proggy yet atmospheric post-metal workouts darker than the black sand beaches of nearby Vík, with vocalist Kári Haraldsson unfurling death growls and eerily-undulated keytar solos above the rest of the band’s volcanic eruptions.
Considering the frontman has also scored various Icelandic film and television projects, there’s a staggering cinematic quality to his band’s self-titled debut album, while singles “Heimslitt” and “Holskefla” also received substantially creepy folk-horror video treatments.
QUOTE “The recording process of our album was a bit cursed, with Hilmir [Árnason, guitar] getting his toe smashed by a badly secured fire extinguisher, which turned the first day of recording into a long trip to the ER,” Haraldsson recalls of a series of misfortunes that took place during the making of Múr.
“Then on what was originally intended to be the last day of recording, the laptop we were using to record everything got crushed by a heavy door, completely obliterating the screen. But the hard drive survived, so the album was safe!”
Until I Wake
RIYL Linkin Park, Bad Omens, Wage War
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Renovate is a most-fitting title for Buffalo, New York, quintet Until I Wake’s upcoming sophomore album.
Though they’d lain a solid foundation with 2022 full-length debut Inside My Head, the band went into rebuild mode late last year when former vocalist Cody Jamison bowed out of the project ahead of a U.S. tour. That’s when bassist Ryan Ridley called up rapper Jaali Cypher — the pair having previously played together a decade prior in metalcore outfit A Breath Alive — to learn the set in nine days. Multiple tours, a Download Festival appearance and a dozen new songs later, their musical bond is stronger than ever.
Renovate remodels Until I Wake’s sound by mixing high-octane hard rock with classic nu-metal aesthetics, grotesquely gargled-out breakdowns and a bit of rap-flow swagger. Cypher is calling the band “the fucking chameleons of this industry right now” and hopes the multi-pronged approach of their latest release “shakes some trees with its versatility.”
QUOTE Long late-night drives between concert dates can work up an appetite. Fortunately, Until I Wake are resourceful tailgaters of the highest degree, and they’re more than willing to fire up the band BBQ at a moment’s notice. All they need is some prime ground beef and a decent parking spot to get their grill on.
“These are what we call PLPs: Parking Lot Patties,” Jaali explains. “On the road, it’s imperative to save money any way we can, so we bought a grill and we started grilling our food. It might attract some forest creatures, but it’s all worth it.”
OBEYER
RIYL Meshuggah, Periphery, Cult of Luna
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE OBEYER is the product of four longtime friends pushing themselves into a devastating new era. The Northampton,, U.K., quartet had been working under the name Lay Siege for a number of years, last having released the hopeisnowhere album in 2015, but when guitarist Jamie Steadman bought himself a 7-string guitar just ahead of the pandemic, his riffs — to match the global mood — started plummeting towards inkier, depressive depths. Their rhythms became both progressively and primally djenty, while vocalist Carl Brown started howling heavy of social media depression and emotional tragedy.
They were the same four guys, in essence, but the sound of their developing album suggested they were a wholly different band. As the title of their “Second Sun” single suggests, a new dawn had come, and they’ve been OBEYER ever since.
QUOTE OBEYER emailed their music to Periphery’s 3Dot Recordings on a whim, not expecting one of their favorite bands to actually log-in to hear the tunes. Things got “incredibly surreal” once OBEYER realized multiple members of the djent icons were spinning their music on repeat.
“We were checking the tracks to see how many plays we were getting, and started seeing that Jake [Bowen], Bulb [a.k.a. Misha Mansoor], Haunted Shores, and Spencer [Sotelo] were listening,” Steadman recalls of how they got on the 3Dot roster.
“We were in the WhatsApp group chat asking each other, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ We refused to believe it was anything other than them just doing due diligence, but then the email from the label manager comes in that he wants to do a Zoom call. We couldn’t really say no to the opportunity!”