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 country-metal, slam, thrash 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.
SpiritWorld – “Abilene Grime”
Start spit-shinin’ your rose-sequined suit jackets and get ready to hit the pit: SpiritWorld are back with another country-metal masher of epic proportions.
“Abilene Grime” is the second taste from the Las Vegas culture-jammers’ next LP, Helldorado, and it’s an especially wild crossover of western shuffle beats and Slaytanic guitarplay, vaulting from one extreme to another across the hellfire-fueled arrangement. Bandleader and vocalist Stu Folsom, however, is raging hard the whole time as he screams of devil’s kisses and a darkness inside that’s destined to drag him deep down to Beelzebub’s basement.
The video goes for the jugular, too, with a hot-and-horny makeout session between a hellcat and a priest getting plenty bloody by song’s end
Lacuna Coil – “Gravity”
“Gravity” is ostensibly a song about feeling off-balance and unwell as you’re floating through the “dark avenues of depression and hate” — or at least so suggests growling Lacuna Coil co-vocalist Andrea Ferro during the one-chord-chugging verse of the Italian goth-metal masters’ latest Sleepless Empire preview.
Then again, there’s also an incandescent majesty to the way Cristina Scabbia croons in its chorus that the collective are bound to find their footing soon (“I have to fall down to climb back on top”).
Either way, we “feel the adrenaline” pumping through Lacuna Coil’s veins on this banger — in fact, there’s lots coursing through ours, too.
Church Tongue – “Bury Me (One Thousand Times)”
High-grade blasts and infectiously doom-dripping riffage make up the avalanche of oppressive sounds on Church Tongue’s “Bury Me (One Thousand Times),” the mid-western metalcore group’s first song in three years. It’s such a stunner that we’re going sit for a few minutes more before tunneling out of the aural wreckage.
The track is set to appear on the band’s apparently love-themed You’ll Know It Was Me EP, their first for Pure Noise Records (making them labelmates with guitarist Nicko Calderon’s other bands: Knocked fucking Loose). We adore what Church Tongue have shown us so far.
Mercy Ties – “Love All the People”
Mercy Ties vocalist Andre Sanabria is screaming about existential malaise (“What’s the point?”) and a dying world on his band’s new single, but despite that grim outlook there’s still plenty to look forward to these days. Take, for instance, how the Seattle group are about to release Reflections and Criticisms, their first album in 10 years, this March.
The song is a quick, glumly swung crush that speaks to a particular kind of Pacific Northwest-made heaviness (think a more brooding, less mathematically groove-driven Botch). Our overall reflection and criticism for Mercy Ties, based on “Love All the People”? The album couldn’t come soon enough.
“Spare us from suffering,” indeed
Warbringer – “A Better World”
While a furiously melo-thrashed pace invigorates L.A. veterans Warbringer’s first single from their forthcoming album, Wrath & Ruin — just feel the metronome-exploding drum work of Carlos Cruz — frontman John Kevill screams of a lifeless, blotted-out existence on the sarcastically-titled “A Better World.”
Narratively, the tune is pretty bleak, with Kevill observing “decaying cities” and a hopeless future through a smartphone obsession, a prescription-sedated haze and a hollow grin.
The glass-half-full side of things is that the thrillingly raged-drilled singer is an all-out ripper that’ll fuel you for days to come —so that’s got to count for something!
Bodybox – “realcocainemuzak”
None of that fakecocainemuzak for us, thank you very much. We’re only interested in the pure, uncut product Bodybox are hawking — like this opening track from their upcoming debut album, 3.
“realcocainemuzak” is a freakish, panic-sweating adrenaline rush of dumpster-pinging blast beats, vocal grotesquerie and the most expertly ignorant slam riffs this side of the Everglades.
The Floridian Maggot Stompers are authentically disgusting here, and the upcoming record could be a real high point for 2025.