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 hardcore, pop-punk, post-hardcore 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.
Architects – “Brain Dead” (feat. House of Protection)
Times are crazy, but sometimes — as Sam Carter screams it out on Architects’ fast-thwapped and synapses-frying “Brain Dead” single with post-everything experimentalists House of Protection — you gotta find a bit of bliss in the apocalypse. And this song does the trick.
The all-star team-up pays off big, with Architects and HOP hitting heavy through blisteringly aggro hardcore riffs, anthemically raspy chorus hooks and a glitched-out punk-tronica breakdown. Late in the track, Carter and guest HOP vocalist Stephen Harrison howl out that there’s “an error in the source code,” but if you ask us, “Brain Dead” seems to be firing on all cylinders.
Ecca Vandal – “CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE”
“I’m moving up where I belong.”
Australian genre-contortionist Ecca Vandal has hit a vast assortment of sounds over the years, from alt-punk to rap and more. She’s really hit her stride, however, through her most recent round of anthemic, pop-core-styled singles — the latest being this week’s pogo-inducing “CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE.”
Driven by a grimy but hummable bass groove that conjures Turnstile-by-way-of-Fugazi’s “Waiting Room,” and focused on a playfully raspy performance about moving onwards and upwards in the world, the tune has elevated Vandal’s status in the world of bouncy, melody-bruised music.
Mugshot – “Vale of Tears”
To paraphrase Mugshot vocalist Ringo Waterman’s grotesquely-retching performance on the San Jose, California, group’s first single of 2025, we are absolute gluttons for the kind of malice they’re dishing out these days.
With “Vale of Tears,” the metalcore veterans offer up a viscous, violent beatdown replete with sinewy, death-adjacent guitar trilling and pulverizing percussive beats. Above all that, Waterman offers up throaty, vividly disconcerting scenarios about being “bred for death” and forced onto a veritable conveyor belt of human misery. “You were never meant to make it out,” he growls in the closing breakdown.
Nevertheless, we’re thankful Mugshot’s single escaped onto streamers this week.
Get the Shot – “Pit of Misery”
On a similar tangent, Quebec City hardcore unit are seemingly more than happy to toss us into the disgusting depths of their “Pit of Misery” — and going by the Giallo-like, black-leather-gloves-and-bowie-knife-laden single artwork for the new single, things are gonna get extra messy before we even hit the ground.
“Pit of Misery” swings wildly through Slaytanically minor-chord guitar harmonies and noise-grooved-and-squealed stomp sections, while vocalist Jean-Philippe Lagacé uses his pterodactyl-like screech to sum up the many ways he’s feeding off the suffering of an unworthy foe.
All told, the song’s as unrelenting as Lagacé’s promise that he’ll “find you even in death, bitch.”
Bleed From Within – “God Complex”
20 years in, Glasgow, Scotland’s Bleed From Within are delivering their most arena-ready yet monstrously heavy songs yet. Call it manifest destiny, as you really do have to swing for the rafters if you coronate your latest crusher “God Complex.”
Deceptively straight-forward and stomping, the thusly named song traffics in dark violet hooks, but also offers up a mix of exquisitely barbaric guitar chugging and octopus-armed drum work. It also features a vintage Hammett-esque, wah-cresting guitar solo that — to flip vocalist’s Scott Kennedy’s lyrics on the self-described “anthem for the corrupt” — just demands to be fucking worshipped.
While Kennedy screams on the piece that we’re all just flesh and bone, at the end of the day, we’re willing to admit that Bleed from Within are on some true king shit here.
Dying Wish – “I Brought You My Soul (Your World Brought Me Despair)”
“‘I am miserable yet I am sane’”
Dying Wish vocalist Emma Boster explained this week that her Portland, Oregon, metalcore group’s new single is about how “constantly witnessing the brutality and injustices has taken a toll on our collective mental health.” It’s a grimly relatable theme, but just as the band power through the tune with dexterously-djented fury, it’s also a plea for us to keep our heads on straight through all the extraneous chaos.
Balancing some of the act’s heaviest riffs yet with brief reprieves of amp-cranked melody, the song — according to Boster — is “the most authentic version of Dying Wish” so far.