Meet TORN OPEN: Deathcore upstarts turning chaotic friendship into beautifully nasty music

Torn Open didn’t bring the taser into the hotel room, but drummer Michael Karnage was the one who ended up using it. Repeatedly. And on himself.

“Physically, I wasn’t concerned for him, but he kept doing it,” guitarist Margot Bogosian now chuck­les of her bandmate. She’s recalling an afterparty on the New Jersey deathcore crew’s chaotic spring tour when they borrowed another group’s stun gun.

Torn Open were super drunk, stuffed full of Dom­ino’s pizza and frantically hopping across hotel beds to avoid Karnage’s self-shocking antics. Bodies went flying. People keeled over laughing. Naturally, the whole thing ended up on their Instagram.

“He would never hurt a fly,” vocalist Sofia DeMasi says, “but he would definitely tase himself — and vol­unteer to do it first. He’s that type of guy.”

“The next day he’s complaining that his leg hurts,” adds Bogosian.

DeMasi jumps in: “We were like, ‘Well… maybe it’s because you tased yourself!’”

To DeMasi, the incident was both intense and fun­ny, which is probably as good a window as any into the overall dynamic of Torn Open: a jolly band of New Jersey miscreants making some of the modern heavy scene’s most compellingly dangerous-sound­ing deathcore records.

Since forming in 2024 and solidifying their cur­rent lineup the following year, Torn Open have been delivering profoundly brutal performances onstage and across their two-volume EP series, TORN THE FUCK OPEN. This May’s VOL. 2 marked their first re­lease through Blue Grape Music.

The quintet — DeMasi, Bogosian, Karnage, guitar­ist Marcelo Crespo and bassist Canaan Sharon — deal in blast-fracked severity, dummy-mode breakdown riffs, gargantuan gutturals and lyrics about workers taking down the billionaire class at any cost. Their extreme aesthetic has led to collabs with deathcore monsters like former Chelsea Grin vocalist Alex Koe­hler and Brutality Podcast host Yan Blanchette.

Yet Torn Open are also the kind of band who’ll just as easily launch into a goofy, mosh-gnarly re­arrangement of the Nyan Cat meme song. Offstage, they might raid a bowling alley arcade for an absurd haul of cutesy fluorescent rubber ducks. Onstage, 4’10” vocalist DeMasi is known to playfully throw fists with the crowd like a “chipmunk” in the pit, as the rest of the group puts it. But before leading the smackdown as Torn Open’s feral singer, DeMasi was an aspiring beatmaker.

DeMasi grew up in a musical household and con­nected with the rhythms she heard while listening to Rush with her father, a professional guitarist who’d once shared a stage with “Margaritaville” songwriter Jimmy Buffett. Drums became the younger DeMasi’s first instrument, and she continues to attend music school to fine-tune her timekeeping. As she got into heavy music in her youth, she gravitated toward for­mer Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler’s punishing style. Though it’d be years before she learned that vocals were her true calling, DeMasi now cites Randy Blythe as a key influence on her own inhuman howl.

Before Torn Open, DeMasi was ripping behind the kit for a metal act called Final Girls. She was killing it on a technical level, but a number of fac­tors — the demands of drumming, her job as a tat­too artist and the hyper-critical and often creepy comments she started facing from guys in person and online — began to wear her down. The stress got so bad that DeMasi started vomiting at con­certs. She knew something had to change.

“I would beat myself up over small mistakes, be­cause it would make it that much easier for people to find any discrepancies with my playing,” she recalls. “After a while, it genuinely started taking a toll on my body. I started getting really bad migraines and anxiety attacks before and after playing shows. So, I was like, ‘Guys, I’ll write and record for you, but I just don’t think I can play drums live anymore.’ With vocals I’m fine, though.”

Bogosian’s a lifelong musician, too, though her journey toward Torn Open took a gentler route. She began performing “sweet little jazz stuff” as a kid, floating between mandolin, double bass and acoustic guitar. By her teens, she was experiment­ing with ambient, echo-blown guitar textures and soft-whispered vocals as Total — the solo project she maintains to this day. Her life and her guitar tone took a turn for the heavy the day she lucked upon a deathcore classic.

“A couple summers ago, I found a Suicide Silence album and I was like, ‘What the heck! I’ve never heard someone play the guitar like this. This sounds like it would feel so good to play,’” she recalls.

Bogosian bought a seven-string and started riff­ing. She soon began posting Instagram stories of herself playing metal, with the goal “to try and lure people into asking me to be in their band.” She re­flects on this with a laugh: “It worked!”

The future bandmates were already running through the same local North Jersey venues, just in different corners of the scene, with Bogosian hitting shoegaze shows and DeMasi plunging into the met­al circuit. Social media became the connection point. DeMasi flipped after seeing a serendipitous post of Bogosian covering Lamb of God’s “In Your Words.” After a mutual acquaintance confirmed to the sing­er that the person behind Total was “low-key into deathcore,” the two met up, quickly became friends and founded Torn Open.

DeMasi and Bogosian went through a few versions of Torn Open before the lineup snapped into place. Sharon was a jazz-head DeMasi knew through music school, while Crespo is an arpeggiating fretboard de­mon who answered an open call on Instagram after an­other guitarist left the project. Karnage had played in groups with both DeMasi and Crespo before becoming the act’s most electrifying drummer yet.

TORN THE FUCK OPEN, VOL. 2 is the first release from the band’s current incarnation, and it finds them exploding into a sensory overload of power-blasted filthiness and all-gunk slow-grooves. DeMasi serves up depraved screeches and fry vocals throughout. She calls the EP more thematically entwined than their first, with lyrics that reflect how “our nervous systems are shot” by the current global landscape.

She howls of a need for political, social, environ­mental and economic change, while the video for “The Way Things Should End” shows her violently gutting a wealthy elite. Still, the four-song release’s concluding “…And So We Rise” more optimistically yearns for peace and harmony. At the very least, Torn Open seem to have found their own version of that with one another.

While DeMasi is retired from drumming on the touring circuit, she recently got behind the kit for a school recital. Her Torn Open bandmates supported her onstage, and together they played a short set of metal covers — including, understandably, Lamb of God’s “In Your Words.”

Torn Open are already plotting the follow-up to their latest EP, but first they plan to hit the road for more touring, a prospect they clearly relish.

“We’re literally jumping up and down and gig­gling and smiling at each other onstage while prank­ing each other,” DeMasi says. “It’s really fun.” Expect those shows to arrive with plenty of playful chaos and laughter — and maybe a touch of danger.