In the Deathcore arms race, there are moments that stand out for better or worse in recent history. From that moment in ‘To The Hellfire’ by Lorna Shore, the entirety of Killing Of A Sacred Deer’s rusty machete insidiousness to the dodgeball snare Slam insanity of Peeling Flesh, recent times have shown that the quest for unparalleled levels of sonic extremity is still in full swing. Of course, Deathcore as a whole has a pretty heavy baseline but the aforementioned bands among others seem intent on blending elements from other genres and turning it up to 11 in ways that seek to leave you a gibbering wreck.
It would be silly to not count PSYCHO-FRAME as frontrunners in this current pack. Across the last two years, they’ve almost single handedly raised the bar for speed, brutality and utter contempt for eardrums in heavy music. With drums akin to high power machine guns (Shout-out to Leo McClain, who in a cast of phenomenal musicians manages to impress the most), bewildering and incendiary guitar riffs designed to make you want to headbutt the nearest authority figure and vocals that flit between a pigs death rattle and sulphuric belches from hell, it’s a frightening mix.
What sets Psycho Frame apart from other bands is their makeup. Not just deathcore kids, they share members with the alluring alt-rock band Moodring and on some levels, traces of that band come through. For the most part however, this is a different beast (Emphasis on beast) entirely. Elements of Dying Fetus, Suffocation and early Job For A Cowboy are woven together into such a vile, acerbic tapestry that to gaze upon it’s final form stings your eyes a little and that final form is SALVATION LAUGHS IN THE FACE OF A GRIEVING MOTHER.
From runways to TikTok trends, 2025 can’t get enough of Y2K aesthetics. And now Split Chain have delivered the soundtrack to match. So, if you spent the early 2000s listening to Deftones and scrawling DIY mixtape covers (or wish you had been), Split Chain’s motionblur is your new fix.
Over a series of singles released since 2023, this Bristol five-piece have stitched together a unique combo of modern nu metal and shoegaze, shot through with hardcore attitude. motionblur was the test to see if Split Chain could keep it up over a full-length release; and they more than stepped up to the challenge.
Even though, most fans will be listening to the album through streaming, you still get the feel of physical media – the click of a CD player and the spin of a disc are the first sounds of the record, before opener ‘Under The Wire’ kicks off with darkly distorted riffs.
Second song ‘Bored.tired.torn’ sees Split Chain settle into their stride with a moody track tackling family conflict that leans heavily into the band’s angstier emo inspirations. Songs like this one and the infectious ‘who am I?’ show they’ve got a knack for catchier anthemic tracks as well as the more atmospheric moments.
Well, ‘Blackened Shoegaze’ typically walks the fine line between inspired and insipid. As hordes of Deftones wannabes bumble their way through distortion heavy enough to delude their fans into thinking that a barrage of unpleasant and disjointed sound is atmospheric and melancholic, Ba’al roll up their sleeves and show lesser bands in the genre how Post Blackened Shoegaze is done properly.
This is the band’s second release, after 2020’s Ellipsism, and the second release is usually the hardest for a band because they’ve put all their best stuff into their debut, and then, when it’s well received, a band realises: “Wait a minute, we have to do that again??” And this is a post-blackened shoegaze band we’re talking about here, so it’s impressive enough that the band have made it past the Fermi Great Filter of bands. They haven’t just broken up after, say, the drummer got into a fist fight with some part-time promoter in a car park over merch sale percentages, which, in fairness, is the only way the band would be able to get the money for the petrol, Glen’s vodka and black denim they so desperately require.
With the record’s first song, ‘Mother’s Concrete Womb’, Ba’al are proving that lightning can strike twice, and their first record wasn’t just an accidental miracle, with the band being cast into the mass graves of one-and-done metal collectives. This is a group to be taken seriously, and they have something heavy to say. The track lays the foundations for carefully orchestrated rises to be built upon gentle strumming, only to be smashed down with crushing riffages that would put genre leaders Amenra to shame, leaving their listeners trembling with awe as their gasts are left absolutely flabbered.
Ba’al build to bring their listeners up to feelings of almost tentative hope, leaving them there for a few tense and beautifully crafted moments, before finally throwing them to the floor in a crushing post-metal rage. ‘Waxwork Gorgon’ shrieks itself into play; this track hits heavier than your parents’ divorce when you were thirteen. Ba’al bounce between world standard shrieks over crushing doom and then Black Country, New Road styled vocals before ending in soft and gentle strumming. This feels like receiving a loving, tender embrace after doing a few rounds with cocaine era Mike Tyson.
Margarita Witch Cult are the latest in a long line of bands to emerge from the cradle of rock and metal in the UK and much like the iconic earlier sounds of Black Sabbath, they play a murky mix of proto-metal, doom and stoner style rock riffs. Driven by a wall of gratuitous fuzz, booming low end and plenty of groove, the band’s eponymous debut album was highly acclaimed, and they have received plenty of praise, racking up plenty of big shows and touring with the likes of Monster Magnet, a band who practically screams royalty in the stoner rock world. Anticipation was ripe for this second album, everything seemingly lining up and falling into place and here we have it, Strung Out In Hell.
The album consists of 9 tracks encompassing just under 40 minutes. It sounds like something which crawled out of the primordial metal sea near 50 years ago thanks to the clever composition work of the band, their ability to deliver their music convincingly and the gear and production used paying tribute to the heavyweights who paved the way for bands like them. The question though, is this; is it merely lip service tapping into nostalgia? After all, the album has been released within two weeks of Black Sabbath’s retirement and a lot of the PR regarding it has mentioned that this band are ‘the heirs to Sabbath city’.
Led by vocalist and lead songwriter James McHenry, Blind Equation have made a name for themselves in the thriving cybergrind community with their sound that draws more from the 8-bit soundtracks of video games like Castlevania and Chrono Trigger than expected influences such as Emperor and Cradle Of Filth. While their last two albums had plenty of brutal moments, A Funeral In Purgatory turns the aggression up to eleven with far more gothic and death metal influences poking through the synth-based noise.
Whereas their last album Death Awaits kept the extreme metal meets chiptune concept pretty straightforward, occasionally keeping things fresh with dashes of hyperpop and breakcore, A Funeral In Purgatory borrows from artists as far apart as Meshuggah, Nightwish and Machine Girl for a diverse and devastatingly heavy sound. Opening track ‘This Eternal Curse’ sets this new era of Blind Equation apart with chaotic blast beats and piercing retro synths backing McHenry’s vocals which veer wildly from a black metal style screech to heavily autotuned and saturated cleans. While the original vision of Blind Equation is still very much intact, A Funeral In Purgatory immediately sets itself up as a confident and combative step forward.
Since the death by suicide of vocalist and founding member Chris Torpy in 2013, they have let their instruments speak for them, crafting instrumental epics that communicate truths with aching clarity about loss, grief, and, perhaps above all, human will in the face of adversity. Their 2015 album Departure Songs was, and remains, a post-rock elegy of staggering emotional weight. A decade on, it still sits like a stone in the chest of anyone who’s felt the breathless hush that comes with mourning. When the opening of your most widely celebrated record can reduce listeners to tears within its first six gentle notes, it’s fair to say that the bar set for delivering emotionally impactful post-rock is floating somewhere in the stratosphere.
Now, with A Single Flower, the band return from the quiet distance of five plus years away since Departure Songs’ confident follow-up Triumph & Disaster. And they return not with thunder or bombast, but with patience—this is an album that does not demand your attention, but earns it anyway. It trusts the listener. It recognises that grieving is a process. It knows the long, strange arc of healing. Opening track ‘If They Had Hearts’ sets the tone: a deceptively simple five-note riff pulses gently, rising gradually under layers of swirling guitars to a thrilling peak until it all falls away. What’s left is a piano, barely there, a lament so understated it feels like breath fogging a window. This is a mark of things to come as throughout the record, the spaces between the notes matter as much as the notes themselves. The quiet moments let the thoughts and ideas ruminate.
‘A Dance With Death’ emerges from silence in the wake of the album opener, and it’s a highlight—not just of the album, but of the band’s entire catalogue. Gunfire-like percussion explodes beneath a swelling riff that feels as if it’s leading the way to a brighter future. Halfway through, the track falls into a hush so complete that it almost demands silence in the listener’s own environment. And then, just as fluidly as the track recedes into stillness, it erupts—an adrenaline shot to the heart that hits like a desperate affirmation: We are still here, it seems to say. We are still breathing and trying.
