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 blood-soaked theatricore, blackened extreme metal, veteran prog 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.
Scowl – “Special”
Though Scowl have progressively leaned into an alt-rock-adjacent style of hook-making the past few years, the NorCal quintet are still a hardcore band at heart. Take their latest single “Special,” which is their first release through new label home Dead Oceans.
Vocalist Kat Moss may start the song out with an incandescently sparkling set of harmonies, but she eventually ramps herself up towards a raw-and-rage-y approach tailor made for people to sing along to while hopping onto a pile-on pit. Fittingly enough, the song concerns the precarious relationship between performer and audience: “You just wanna hear my screams/Just to feel alive.”
Ice Nine Kills – “A Work of Art”
Where do we even begin with this one? Ice Nine Kills’ new Terrifier-themed song is an over-the-big-top gore-athon that includes guns-blazing metalcore speediness, a guest bass section from System of a Down’s Shavo Odadjian, a vocal performance from Spencer Charnas that runs both Broadway extravagant and pig-grunt grotesque, and lots of lyrical easter eggs for the Art the Clown lovers out there.
The band’s accompanying splatterfest music video (which you can see uncensored over here) is likewise a shock to the senses, specializing in absurd mosh-pit crowd-killing scenes, the sight of Art clowning around with a trumpet and a machine gun, and one extremely gutsy birthing. It’s twisted, must-see mayhem for INK and Terrifier fans alike.
Dream Theater – “Night Terror”
A comeback track 15 years in the making, “Night Terror” marks the first official song from the classic Dream Theater lineup since 2009.
Mike Portnoy is back behind the kit — as he should be — and you truly feel the full heft of his powerful, prog-pivoting rhythms all throughout this 10-minute, gothic-gloomy epic. But the whole band is on-point, too — whether it’s John Petrucci bumblebee-buzzing his way through a guitar solo, Jordan Rudess vibing through electric violet keyboard lines, or vocalist James Labrie getting extra phantasmagoric with his glass-shattering vibrato.
We’ll gladly lose sleep to crank this one up again.
Aversed – “Cross to Bear”
Boston, Massachusetts, extreme-metal unit Aversed gave us an extremely early preview of their Erasure of Color album, which is due next March. And if this is the only song of theirs to drop in the next five months… well, that’s just our cross to bear, we guess.
Lyrically, it’s a heavy-themed song about trauma bonds and reckoning with the aftermath of your actions. Sonically, there’s an elemental appeal to how Aversed contrast Sarah Hartman’s gold-gilded, wide vibrato vocal performance with aching black-metal riffs and a blast-obsessed percussionist going absolutely sick-house on a snare drum.
Spanaway – “Terrible”
Spanaway started out as a band called Blush — Revolver has dug them for some time, praising the act under their original guise back in 2019 for “contrasting the brutal with the beautiful.”
Five years and a name change later, the Pennsylvania post-hardcore pushers’ new single, “Terrible,” maintains that same kind of tonal diptych. It’s full of wall-leveling waves of Hum-styled guitar melancholy, while also showcasing an oddly gentle vocal performance about being choked to death by traumatically nostalgic memories. While the band’s lineup includes Fuming Mouth drummer Keith Goldoni, Spanaway seems to be trafficking in a more subversive and swirling kind of attack.
Kruelty – “Profane Usurpation”
There’s a whirlwind of heaviness going on through Japanese trio Kruelty’s “Profane Usurpation,” the title track to their next EP. You’ve got some wicked beatdown hardcore going on up front, but Kruelty quickly pick up into a double-time D-beat, and then go absolutely volcanic with an intensity-increasing set of blasts. Before they draw things to a close, they add in some classically trilling death-metal riffs (one of which kind of recalls the Inspector Gadget theme) and a bone-decimating mosh.
If that’s too much to keep track of in a single three-and-a-half minute crusher, the veteran brutalizers might’ve summed up their own aesthetic best: “disgusting music from Tokyo, Japan.”