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 metalcore, goth, djent-pop 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.
Gore. – “Angels Like You”
Rising metal experimentalists Gore. revealed a second genre-flipping stunner from their upcoming debut EP, A Bud That Never Blooms, this week. At first blush, the track plays like an early Aughts R&B banger, replete with finger-snap beats, chipmunk-effect vocal tics, and cross-processed, scale-jumping acrobatics from singer Haley Roughton. But then the band bring out a beastly and booming djent riff that causes the singer to switch gears into a fierce and feral howl sesh.
An impressive second step that manages to make the Texan trio sound both hellacious and heaven-sent.
Living Gate – “To Cut Off the Head of a Snake”
International supergroup Living Gate are doling out some of the most whimsically depraved death-metal out there at the moment. Take the band’s new “To Cut Off the Head of a Snake,” a venomous preview of their forthcoming Suffer as One album.
Though the classically, savagely-swung blast intro is max-impact, to say the least, guitarists Lennart Bossu (Amenra) and Levy Seynaeve (Wiegedood) are also pretty adept at throwing in some oddball harmonics to spice things up. It’s not just an ouroboros rehash of the death-metal gods of yore: There’s no way to chase your own tail, of course, if you’ve already chopped off your head.
Linkin Park – “Heavy Is the Crown”
In very obvious ways, Linkin Park looks different these days. That’s only natural, given the recent introduction of vocalist Emily Armstrong and drummer Colin Brittain to the mix. But with “Heavy Is the Crown,” the reconstituted nu-metal institution’s latest preview of their forthcoming album, FROM ZERO, they’re tapping into some classic Linkin dynamics.
Fueled by hungrily melodic guitar hooks and a propulsive and bouncy, Meteora-esque beat, the track bursts out the gate with a classic Mike Shinoda rap. Armstrong recalls late vocalist Chester Bennington’s rasp, while also bringing some big screams of her own.
Better Lovers – “At All Times”
Better Lovers vocalist Greg Puciato told us this week that the band’s new single “At All Times” officially ushered him into his power-ballad era. Oddly enough, that the post-hardcore band chose to release their sweetest-sounding song yet as the third preview of their upcoming Highly Irregular LP kind of recalls the Eighties-era marketing practices behind Bon Jovi and Skid Row album rollouts.
Nevertheless, Puciato does go for more of a tender croon this time around — at least in the intro — before the band ratchets up the weirdness with some angular, if melancholy, guitar damage.
Mouth for War – “The Earth’s Cold Embrace”
Colorado metalcore practitioners are fully dialed-in on new standalone single “The Earth’s Cold Embrace,” delivering compound-fracture beatdowns and shrapnel-spiraling noise chords with a fury that eclipses last year’s raging Bleed Yourself LP. But when it comes to the true star of the song, we’ve just gotta give credit to whomever is hard-bonging the requiem bell that keeps booming into the mix. Now that is some heavy metal.
Vocalist Trae Roberts said this one was inspired by a murder-suicide dream he had, while its video was filmed in an “underground nuclear missile complex.” This is all to say, everything about this song is extra intense.
The Cure – “Alone”
Leave it to Robert Smith to introduce the Cure’s incredibly long-awaited Songs of a Lost World album — which will be the band’s first full-length in 16 years — with the most bleakly dramatic, and curiously quasi-referential, opening line imaginable: “This is the end of every song that we sing.”
Musically, first single and album opener “Alone” is just as aching — a goth-romantic ether dream of teardrop bass plunking, glacially-paced beats and, of course, Smith’s breathtakingly crestfallen vocals. If this is the beginning of the end, as he’s suggesting, let us all toast to our collective emptiness with the bitter dregs the Cure are swirling around here.