Kill Chain are ’bout to whup you.
Last month, the new Canadian hardcore group — comprising members of Comeback Kid, A Mourning Star, Bayonet Dismemberment and more — announced their arrival in an Instagram post, and added that a debut demo was on the way later this spring. Revolver have teamed with the band to premiere “Never Been Yours,” a vicious taste of what’s to come.
The act features Comeback Kid vocalist Andrew Neufeld commanding the mic. The Toronto, Ontario-based frontman is flanked on-record by Vancouver, B.C.-based guitarists Kelsey Yates and Christian Frizzelle (A Mourning Star, Bayonet Dismemberment), bassist Ravi Bhatti (A Mourning Star, Juice) and drummer Nathan Pope (Bayonet Dismemberment).
Yates tells Revolver that Kill Chain formed after she’d taught herself how to play guitar and started flexing “straight to the point” metallic-hardcore riffs to her friends.
“I picked up the guitar for the first time two years ago after wanting to play forever. I started playing every day, learning songs and eventually writing my own riffs,” she explains. “I ended up showing Christian and Andrew what I had written, and to my surprise they both wanted to start a band. I thought they were joking at first, but here we are!”
As for the track, it was recorded on the West Coast with producer Andre Urquidi. The band batter through deep-undulated pinch squeals, bat-to-the-face metalcore chunking and cannon-blast double-kick moshes. Neufeld screams of folks tunnel-focused on their hardships while the rest of us are just trying to eke by (“Nobody hates you, but nobody cares”).
“‘Never Been Yours’ is about an underdog chasing validation and self-worth in a selfish world,” he clarifies. “From the highest highs to the lowest lows, nothing was enough, they could never really make it, resulting in a hard-done by mentality, thinking the world was against them. In reality the world isn’t against you, it’s just indifferent.”
“Never Been Yours” is streaming exclusively right now via the player above before hitting platforms tomorrow (April 28th).
The rest of Kill Chain’s three-song demo — inspired by “retro-cyber, Hackers/Matrix vibes” and “metallic hardcore rooted in death and thrash metal” — will be out by May 5th.