It’s been a massive year for Dying Wish — unquestionably their biggest ever — and the Portland, Oregon, hardcore band have been pushing themselves to the extreme.
Newly released third album Flesh Stays Together ushers the act into a ruthless new era — songs like “I Don’t Belong Anywhere” and “I’ll Know You’re Not Around” supplying meatier, nastier grooves and darkly anthemic choruses that work beyond the more speed-pressed melodeath flavors of their earliest works. The intense and inky effort also finds Emma Boster bolstering her already staggeringly heavy screaming voice with deeply melancholic sung passages, searing the personal and political themes of their Flesh with more melodic presence than ever before.
Behind the scenes, guitarist Pedro Carrillo has been sharpening his skills as a filmmaker, conceptualizing and co-directing a series of music videos inspired by horror movies. This includes the literally breath-taking video for “Revenge in Carnage,” a cement-cracking tune affixed with visuals that find Boster and a young couple taking turns choking each other out with plastic wrap. It looks as dangerous as Dying Wish sound, but Boster confirms that there was a lot of love in the room that day.
“I would just like to say that we had safe words, and there was a lot of hugging and positive reinforcements happening in between [takes], and we would only do things in 10-second increments,” Boster emphasizes of the working conditions. “It was very safe. Despite the triggering-ness of it, it was actually a lot of fun to make, just because of how we were doing it and who we were doing it with.”
When Revolver catches up with Boster and Carrillo, the pair are taking a quick beat to sip cold-brew coffees in the open courtyard of a Sacramento, California, café. It’s a rare off-day from their much-hyped fall tour alongside Poppy and MSPAINT, and they’re pit-stopping in the City of Trees for a big-time appearance at the Aftershock festival.
Earlier in the year they supported longtime friends Spiritbox on the latter’s North American theater tour — Boster occasionally hitting the stage to scream along with Courtney LaPlante. They’re about to join Malevolence and Speed on the road in Europe, then they launch their own North American headline trek with Static Dress, Gouge Away and Orthodox. Finally, they’ll cap it all with their annual scene-galvanizing Dying Wishmas holiday show. This is all to say, 2025 has been and continues to be busy as hell for Dying Wish, but they wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s always been like, ‘OK, what’s next?’” Boster says. “We’re already talking about what our next release looks like — [it’s that] ‘sleep when I’m dead’ mentality.”
“I say this to the band a lot: Everything we want is right there,” Carrillo adds of the grind and why Dying Wish just won’t stop. “Like, we’re on track. The only people that will get in our way is ourselves. It feels good that the effort is there, and everyone else is realizing it.”
Jake Mulka
Flesh Stays Together has a very visceral, yet positive connotation to it. It’s very human. What does it mean to you, just in terms of having or maintaining a connection to others?
PEDRO CARRILLO It’s very to the point, yet it can be taken in a couple different ways. When I thought of that, I was mostly thinking band-wise, as far as, like, everything we’ve done up until now — you know, the trials and tribulations of being in a touring band.
But subconsciously, it came from a zombie movie that I watched, where they were biting each other for comfort. Because that means they’re together in the same circle of zombies, I guess? That’s kind of beautiful, in a way, because they’re sticking together, even if they’re under a very messed-up psychosis or whatever.
A lot of the themes on the album are about flesh — not just in the physical [sense]. It can be taken as religious undertone, or just having it be like, “You’re my flesh, you’re my family, you’re my blood. I will do whatever it takes to protect you.”
What was the movie?
CARRILLO It’s a French movie [2016’s Raw] where this girl tries human meat on accident, and it turns out she loves it. Then at the end, she realizes her family have all been human-meat eaters, and they’re just like, “Oh yeah, this is normal. Welcome!”
You mentioned the trials and tribulations of being in a band. What would those have been between your last two records??
EMMA BOSTER I think for me personally, it’s been touring nonstop. We hit the ground running after we put out Fragments of a Bitter Memory in 2021. Within 14 months, we did seven tours and were gone for nine months out of the year, or something crazy like that.
You just get sick of each other, you know? But I think that we’ve learned how to communicate [with each other], and we’ve learned how to treat ourselves better. The healthier you are as a person, the easier it is for you to manage your relationships with people. For me, that’s [involved] going to therapy and no partying on tour — taking care of my physical and mental health really well.
People in other bands witness how we talk [within the band], and we’re not perfect, but the way that we work out our issues and hear each other out is something that we’ve worked on over the years. It’s definitely necessary when you spend so much time together. That’s where this pride in who we are comes from. Our unit [is] a family, which I think is a lot of what the meaning of Flesh Stays Together is.
CARRILLO I don’t think me, Emma or anyone else in the band thought it would get to this point, as far as being perceived as, like, one of the “up-and-coming bands,” so I think it [took] a lot of maturing, realizing that this is essentially a job, and we have to act like professionals.
BOSTER It’s literally just growing up together. You know, it’s been, what, eight years of doing this now, since our early 20s.
Is there a way to connect that journey to the first song on this record, “I Don’t Belong Anywhere”? Is the story of the band and that discovery within that?
CARRILLO Very much so. When we wrote that, it was more or less a “fuck you” to the music industry, and realizing that we can do anything. We can tour with anybody, and then at the same time, if we’re not accepted by everybody, that’s perfectly fine. Because we don’t belong anywhere.
And then it transformed into an even bigger issue — of being a queer person, of being a trans person, or of being a brown person in this society.
BOSTER They’re literally banning people’s existences. [“I Don’t Belong Anywhere” has] that feeling of “I will forge this path on my own and just be who I am, whether you like it or not.”
How do you personally resonate with the line, “I persist out of spite”?
BOSTER At this moment, we just put out this record that is one of the things that I’m most proud of in my life. [If] people don’t like it, because it’s kind of a departure from what we’ve done in the past — if people are like, “I’m unfollowing the band, I don’t like you guys anymore” — that’s not going to stop me from creating the art that I want to make, the art that I enjoy. I’m just going to keep going.
Jake Mulka
Can you speak to some of those differences on the record? It’s not that it didn’t exist before, Emma, but your clean vocals are definitely pushed further than they have been in the past.
BOSTER I think one of my favorite moments on the record is the bridge in “A Curse Upon Iron.” I sing in this really soft falsetto, and then I go into a deeper moment in my alto range. It was just so cool to be able to explore my vocals. I’ve wanted to push my capabilities as much as I could, and I feel like I really did that on this record.
While there are a lot of clean moments, I don’t think it takes away from the sheer heaviness of the record. It was meant to add an element of emotion that would add to this haunting and heavy atmosphere we were going for.
CARRILLO A lot of the singing was mostly inspired by bands that do the singing over the heavy parts: Only Living Witness, Type O Negative.
Emma, you recently shared a video of your old high-school choir singing an Estonian protest song, which you revealed was a connection point to “A Curse Upon Iron.” What is your song about?
BOSTER “A Curse Upon Iron” is the translation from the Estonian piece “Raua needmine” by Veljo Tormis. The song is about living in a war-ravaged country — [of] living in a society that fetishizes war and bombs and weapons, and the impact that that has on people and our inevitable doom. So, that piece really revolutionized me at a young age, [when I was] 15-16 years old in the choir.
My choir teacher was very much always trying to have us perform pieces that were outside of the box. I’ve always had this weird obsession with choral — Estonian choral music, especially — just because of the history behind it. It was really cool to have this be a part of my music today. I never thought that anyone would care about that connection, but it is cool that people do.
The sound of this record is a little more groove-forward than [2023’s] Symptoms of Survival. Pedro, what can you tell us about slowing things down a bit?
CARRILLO [Guitarist] Sam [Reynolds] and [bassist Jon] Mackey are the music writers, and they were trying to do something new with the band. That we don’t have the melodeath-type riffs as much on this album was definitely purposeful. And the way that every song is structured complements the singing parts.
Pedro, you had a hand in co-directing all of the music videos for this album. How did your eye and visual aesthetic evolve as you were preparing the different kinds of videos?
CARRILLO A lot of the times when me and Emma would write lyrics, I would put on movies [to] put me in the mood to write. And I’ve always wanted to do something [in the band,] visually. Musically, we had the best of the best [in] Mackey and Sam — like, they didn’t need my help. So, I was like, ‘If I can step up and really match the heaviness of the music [with] the visual stuff, why not give it a try?”
I’ve been inspired by horror, but also thrillers. David Fincher is one of my favorite directors. And as far as [the] horror stuff, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci are incredible directors.
One of the harshest visuals attached to this album is the video for “Revenge in Carnage.” What was it like producing that literally dangerous asphyxiation scene on-set?
CARRILLO I believe it was [co-director] Imani [Gervitz]’s idea to just bring the album artwork to life, [but] I was like, ‘We should make a found-footage-type thing.” That’s one of my favorite genres of horror.
She had her camera, I had my iPhone, that’s all we needed. God bless our talent — they were super gung-ho about everything. They were down to do anything we asked.
BOSTER [The actors are also] in love with each other. It’s adorable.
CARRILLO Yeah, it was funny having a couple who are obviously in love strangling each other on-camera, and, like, suffocating each other. But it was the perfect pairing. That is more authentic than having two random people who just show up on set and meet each other there for the first time.
Infamous film-school phrasing here, and not so much a question as it is an observation: The color grading on your “I’ll Know You’re Not Around” video, and even some of the imagery, gives R.E.M. “Losing My Religion” vibes. A very earthy tone palette…
CARRILLO That was one of the references, for sure. It was that, the “Closer” video by Nine Inch Nails, and a Garbage video.
Imani Givertz
Emma, you made an Instagram post during the run with Spiritbox that featured a lot photos from the tour, some of them being of you singing onstage with Courtney, and the caption is: “I’m just happy to be at the table.” Can you lean into the feeling of gratitude you put into that post?
BOSTER That quote is actually taken from the new season of The White Lotus. There’s a storyline where there’s three ladies, and they reunite [for a vacation]. They have a horrible time together, but then they kind of have this moment of “I’m just happy to be here [with you].”
I don’t want to say writing the record was agonizing, [but] it was a difficult process for me. To go through an emotional experience writing things that I feel very strongly about — whether it be personally or in a worldview aspect — and then going from that to the biggest tour that we’ve ever done in our career… I feel like this year I’ve embraced the most human experience I’ve ever had in my life.
I’m the most tired I’ve ever been, but it’s been really cool to work so hard and have people care — people that I look up to, like Courtney, include me in things. It’s been a really incredible year.
You sang onstage with Courtney this year, you’d done that semi-recently with The Devil Wears Prada, as well. Are there any dream duets you have in mind for the future?
BOSTER A dream collab right now would be [Paramore’s] Hayley Williams. She’s been everywhere lately, so it’s not too far off the realm of possibility.
And Evanescence, I would love to do. I met Amy Lee earlier this year — she’s incredible. She just did the collaboration with Poppy and Spiritbox [“End of You”], so maybe in a few years we’ll be there. And we would love to kind of dip our toes into the world of stuff like Ethel Cain and Phoebe Bridgers.
You’ve hinted at living through tough times, but there’s obviously good times to be had, too. One we’d assume has been a very significant one for you, Emma, was your wedding this year to Jeremy DePoyster from the Devil Wears Prada. How has that changed your outlook, in general?
BOSTER It’s crazy. I’ve been with Jeremy for three years, but life does have a different color to it. There’s this sense of security that I’d just never had in my life, and I truly feel chosen by somebody. I think that has taken away a lot of the stress of the last three years for me, just [by] having that that rock of a person in my corner.
Pedro, what’s making you happiest at the moment?
CARRILLO I would say [it’s that] the hard work [of Dying Wish] is being reciprocated. Putting out the record and having it being received well… It’s been positive.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.