Even before Johnny Whitney hoisted his sledgehammer high during the video shoot for his Evil Island project’s “Animal,” the singer knew he and his bandmates were about to make a smashing return to the world of hardcore.
Aesthetically, the new group recalls the feral weirdness of the Blood Brothers, the Seattle, Washington, outfit Whitney and two other Evil Island members first began playing in as teenagers in the Nineties. Their initial decade-long run built them a cult following, and even broached the mainstream once they made their Ross Robinson-produced major label debut, 2003’s …Burn, Piano Island, Burn.
Evil Island was formed shortly after the Blood Brothers wrapped a successful reunion tour in 2024. The new group announced themselves in late 2025, and since then, Whitney has taken on the guise of a campy — if disconcerting — spiritual leader. He delivers speeches on socials as a creepily wide-eyed Marshall Applewhite-type dead-set on recruiting you into the Evil Island Death Cult.
In the “Animal” vid, the act are communally drinking from blood-filled goblets. Then Whitney brings out the hardware for a crazed ritual that finds him pulverizing one follower’s head into a pile of goo — fruit-flavored, the way he tells it.
“We used a silicone head filled with Jell-O for the actual impact,” he explains, said foodstuffs gorily splattering into the air, Scanners-style. “To get it to look natural, I had to actually do 95 percent of the sledgehammering toward an actual guy’s head and then pull back just before impact. While I was driving home from the shoot, I was thinking about how easily I could have fucked it up and actually smashed his head. It gave me the chills.”
What’s giving Whitney a more ecstatic thrill these days is the fact that he’s back doing what he does best: writing raw and surrealist hardcore with his friends.
Evil Island’s debut album, Terraform the Afterlife, reunites him with guitarist Cody Votolato and drummer Mark Gajadhar, two lifelong collaborators and fellow Blood Brothers co-founders. When that band began in the Nineties, they merged the kinetic, chaotic flair of bands like Swing Kids, Angel Hair and Antioch Arrow with bloody-kissed, surrealist lyricism — as delivered by the sassed-and-screamed tandem of Whitney and vocal co-conspirator Jordan Blilie.
As time went on, their music became increasingly complex and epic, their later records see-sawing between cacophonous six-minute explosions and slinking minimalism bolstered by smooth-jazzing woodwinds. While ambitious, Whitney suggests they might’ve strayed too far from their basement-punk origins.
“In the Blood Brothers there was always this tension between who we were and who we wanted to be,” the singer explains. “As we got older and the band got bigger, we started to become more interested in what we could do than what we were actually best at doing. We kept trying to push the boundaries of the band, and eventually we pushed them so far that we lost some of the thing that made us special in the first place.”
Richie Valdez
The reunion tour found the group reconnecting with each other, as well as the most frenetically-paced pieces of their songbook. Whitney got his voice back into fine, furious form, and he and the rest of the Bros. crushed a series of sold-out shows on both coasts. The performances taught the frontman “how to be the best version” of himself “in a spazzy hardcore band,” but by the end of the run, it became clear that the reunion would be temporary. “Once I realized that, the idea of just walking away from it felt unbearable,” he now says.
He and guitarist Votolato were determined to keep the bond going and started passing song ideas back and forth. Gajadhar came in next, and then they recruited bassist Autry Fulbright (And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, OFF!). As they started developing new music, they started showing up at Ross Robinson’s recording studio in Malibu, California. It was another reunion, as the producer had also worked with the Blood Brothers on their major label debut, 2003’s …Burn, Piano Island Burn.
While it’d be overly dramatic to label Terraform the Afterlife a course-correction, Evil Island are coming from an aesthetically punker place than late-era Blood Brothers. First single “Tiger Baby” plays with the sneered vocals and angular guitar stabs of their past, yet Terraform’s “Terminatrixx” is steered by a fast-pounded beat, Votolato’s primitively to-the-point hardcore riff, and the back-and-forth screams of Whitney and Michael Gatto, the teenaged frontman for L.A. hardcore upstarts XCOMM.
The album also features guest spots from Fugazi guitarist-vocalist Guy Picciotto — who’d co-produced the Blood Brothers’ Young Machetes — Sleigh Bells’ Alexis Krauss, and former Bros. bandmate Blilie. They added former Glassjaw guitarist Todd Weinstock to the lineup after the album was recorded.
While it runs red-eyed raging at times, Terraform the Afterlife also pokes at mutated surf-punk, sleek-pounded post-hardcore and more. “Evil Island is, in some ways, us trying to see how far we can push that Blood Brothers aesthetic and energy without losing the original feeling that made us want to start a band together in the first place.”
He continues: “There’s something really liberating about realizing you don’t have to outgrow the thing you loved when you were 15. You can just get better at it.”
Steve Hash
This album connects multiple generations of hardcore vocalists – from Guy, through to you, and up to Michael from XCOMM. How do you reflect on Evil Island being that bridge?
Johnny Whitney Yes, Evil Island is a beautiful Millennial bridge that brings Gen X punks together with Gen Z. Next record we plan on doing collabs with Iggy Pop and Skibidi Toilet to bring Boomers and iPad babies into the fold.
…Honestly though, it feels pretty incredible to have that wide a range of collaborators on the record. I’m so used to writing for two vocalists that having some guest spots on the album seemed natural. Everything other than Jordan being on a song was unplanned going into the recording.
The idea to have Alexis on “Melted Heart” came about because the part she’s on was written in the studio, and I just kept hearing her voice on it whenever we played it back. Same with Guy. I actually had a running joke in the studio where, whenever I listened to early takes of “T-Hexx,” I’d do the “A” part of the chorus in a Guy Picciotto voice. Eventually it sounded wrong in my head without him on it, so at some point we just said, “Fuck it, let’s call him. Maybe there’s a one-in-a-million chance we can convince him to do it.”
Michael from XCOMM was the production assistant on the record and was there every day of the recording. I was listening to their early songs a lot while driving back and forth from L.A., where we made the record, to the Bay Area, where I live. He has such a feral, unguarded quality to his voice that at some point I just heard it in the call-and-response for “Terminatrixx,” the song he sings on.
Every person’s contribution basically clicked immediately in the room from the moment we heard it, which I think has a lot to do with the expertise each of them brings to their craft. At the end of the day, it felt less like different generations colliding and more like the right people just immediately understanding the same language.
While there’s three full-time Blood Brothers in Evil Island, you also reconnected with Jordan for “I Bought a Spell.” You two had been super entwined with your lyric writing, and often with how you screamed together. How in-depth was the collaborative process with him on this song, since he’s somewhat of the outsider looking in?
We asked Jordan early on to collaborate on the record. He was legally obligated to make a guest appearance as part of our Blood Brothers divorce settlement — kidding, obviously. He lived less than a mile from the studio, and given how intertwined we’d been creatively for so many years, it felt pretty inevitable that he’d end up on the record somehow.
Originally, I had planned on him doing “T-Hexx” with us because it has a pretty Blood Brothers-y call-and-response on the chorus, so it seemed like a no-brainer. While we were in pre-production, though, we were toying with the song structure of “I Bought a Spell” because it was the most open-ended of the songs we had brought into the studio. It was just three parts, none of them repeating, and it felt super weird but in an unfinished kind of way. It ended on the super-happy surfy riff — we called it the “Sprite riff” because it sounded like a Sprite commercial.
Everything was there. It just felt like it was missing one ingredient. The lyrics were some of my favorite that I had come up with while we were demoing. It’s a story about an incel who buys a love spell on Etsy, tries it, and it goes horribly wrong — but the nature of the “wrong” is sort of ambiguous. The verse is just a list of the wild and unsavory ingredients in the spell.
In pre-production I had the idea to end the lyrics with the character throwing himself off a bridge and literally waking up in hell. Not as an attempt to moralize, but rather to dig into the visceral feeling of thinking hell is this ridiculous fairy tale, then dying and waking up in horror realizing how badly you fucked up.
I told the guys about the idea, and they came up with the perfect accompaniment and ending for the song. Pun not intended, but it’s one of the most evil-sounding parts I’ve ever heard Cody, Mark and Autry come up with.
Once it all came together, it became my favorite song of the session, and the idea popped into my head to do a Blood Brothers-y call-and-response on the verse. At that point it seemed like a slam dunk to have Jordan guest on it instead of “T-Hexx,” so we ran with it.
The chorus in that song has you singing about “summertime vampires” feeling good, yet looking like shit. Considering you and your wife, Amy, have had your Crystal City clothing brand for years, how would you best glam up the beach goths this particular season?
When I’m at the beach with my goth friends, we exclusively wear Tommy Bahamas. No exceptions.
Various parts about this project are leaning into the idea of the band as a death cult, and it seems to be poking at themes of false idolatry, grifter culture and the collapse of capitalism. It’s done through absurdism, but it’s serious critique. What’s drawing you into that spiral at the moment?
While we were recording, I became really fascinated with Jonestown, Waco and Heaven’s Gate. Besides being incredible stories, there are some genuinely absurd and hilarious moments in all of them.
For example, toward the end of Jonestown, when the Temple members were starving and desperate, Jim Jones would fabricate news reports and broadcast them over the ham radio. Part of it was because there was essentially no entertainment on the compound, and part of it was a power play. He would do this day after day while his followers were surviving on one meal a day of rice and gravy, and then give them weekly tests on the contents of his completely fabricated news reports, with stiff punishments for getting the answers wrong. It’s so insane and funny that, if you zoom out, it could almost be in a Danny McBride show.
The more I thought about it, the less I saw cults as these bizarre fringe phenomena, and the more I started seeing them as exaggerated versions of legitimate institutions. The main difference is that a cult has the bad manners to call itself a cult.
What interests me isn’t really the beliefs or the charismatic figure at the center. It’s the point where you’ve invested so much in something that you’re no longer really free to leave. You join voluntarily, build an identity around it, make sacrifices, and eventually the cost of walking away becomes so high that you have to keep playing by its rules even if you no longer believe in them.
And once you get to that point, things can get really dark. Once they know you can’t easily leave, the rules can get more arbitrary and unhinged, the demands can get bigger, and eventually the system starts serving itself. If there’s no real way out, whoever is in charge becomes the law.
I’ve experienced less extreme versions of that in my own life, and I think you see versions of it everywhere. If you build your entire identity around a band, a career, a religion, a political movement or a social-media platform, eventually that thing has enormous leverage over you, because leaving means losing everything you’ve built inside it. The more you invest, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between choosing to participate and being trapped by your own investment.
That’s the part that fascinates me. A really effective system doesn’t necessarily need to force you to stay. It just makes leaving expensive enough that you’ll police yourself.
You sledgehammered a dude’s head into a pulp in the “Animal” video. How many takes did you get for that?
I stole the idea of Saran-wrapping a guy’s head to a cement block and sledgehammering his head from the Russian mercenary organization the Wagner Group. This is supposedly something they actually do to punish defectors. It might be fake, but it’s a good story nonetheless.
Ross Robinson
As could be expected, you’ve got wild, feverish lyrics on this record. What’s the most immediately surreal line you can think of off the album?
One of my favorites is from “Melted Heart”: “I’m a supermodel with shit smeared in my teeth, crucify myself on your lawn.” I wanted the song to be about public meltdowns and I feel like that line really nailed it. I also really love “Stare at the sun until it goes insane, and there’s rats inside your brain” from “Grow Spikes.”
This is the first record you’ve personally made with Ross since Piano Island . What was it like reconnecting with him?
Reconnecting with Ross was truly one of the most special experiences of my life. I was very reclusive and closed-off emotionally when we recorded …Burn, Piano Island, Burn, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with him — much less than the other members of the Blood Brothers.
For this record, I wanted to really let him in and have it be a true partnership, both creatively and emotionally. He poured himself into this record. I’ve never experienced the kind of discipline and dedication he showed in producing this record from anyone, including any of my bandmates or myself.
He worked on this record for almost six months with only a handful of days off. We started every vocal session with a conversation about the lyrics that never lasted less than 30 minutes. I’d explain what I thought the song was about, what I was thinking when I wrote it, what I thought about it now, and how it had changed as the recording progressed.
Even when we were recording the same song multiple days in a row, we’d find new angles about the lyrics to discuss. By the time we started tracking, we’d both be so dialed in emotionally that the takes would come out fucking insane.
He would have me sing the song 10 or 15 different ways and then listen to them over and over again to find the perfect half-second gasp, screech or vocal tic. The man has incredible instincts and knows our creative potential in such a deep way.
These songs were mainly written and worked on in the studio, but you’re finally bringing them to the stage this weekend. Why did you hold off on performing live until after the album was out?
We held off performing because we wanted to introduce the band to people through the videos and the record before we started playing live.
Playing live is always much more fun if people know your songs, especially in our case, where the vast majority of people who show up are going to be Blood Brothers fans who are probably secretly hoping we’ll bust out “Set Fire to the Face on Fire.”
The poster for the show is kind of tongue-in-cheek, listing that a “secret” band is playing—though it’s a promo photo of you guys with Groucho Marx masks drawn over your faces. With that in mind, what’s the proper power ranking of masked bands that have worked with Ross, between yourselves, Slipknot and Swollen Teeth?
I’m glad someone is finally getting to the bottom of this power ranking. I’ve given it hours of thoughtful consideration, and it has to be Evil Island, Slipknot, Swollen Teeth. The reason is this: The Groucho Marx masks are a misdirection to conceal the fact that we’re actually going to be performing in Bluey masks, which I think gives us an unfair competitive advantage.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.
Evil Island’s Terraform the Afterlife is out today (August 14th) via Blowed Out Records. An exclusive “Rainbow Color in Color Splatter” vinyl variant, limited to 300, is available now in Revolver’s shop.
The band’s debut performance is tomorrow at Los Angeles, California’s Club Tee Gee. More show info can be found here