Browsing Tag

Metalcore

Cody Hyde – Final Ending: a Metalcore Juggernaut with Stadium-Sized Survival Scorched Through It

Posted on 31 May 2026

Stadiums should be scrambling to prepare themselves to host Cody Hyde, a revolutionary of metalcore and hard rock fusionism whose ability to augment overdriven amplification feels seemingly infinite. His latest release, Final Ending, featuring Marko Duplisak, is a harbinger of melodically juggernautical visceralism, reinforced with the kind of raw emotion that hits hard enough to leave you with a concussion.

Resonating as a refusal to sink into the clutches of absolute nihilism, Final Ending becomes an exposition of how we will meet final endings in our lifetimes, but none except the final ending deserves apathy. Cody Hyde turns that premise into a full-throttle statement of defiance, placing melodic hooks beside blast beats, serrated guitars, and Lamb of God-esque screamo vocals that tear through the verses with razor-sharp teeth.

For fans of Bullet For My Valentine, Metallica, and Five Finger Death Punch, the single carries the scale, muscle, and melodic instinct of arena-ready metal. Hyde, a guitarist and composer from Milaca, Minnesota, has been building towards his second studio album, Songs For the Broken, with tracks rooted in personal struggle, toxic relationships, and a broken world. Here, the soaring hard rock choruses hook themselves inside your throat while riffs strut as salacious guitar porn, making ambivalence impossible.

Final Ending is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

LAKE ACACIA’s Post-Hardcore Industrial Juggernaut, Tear You Down, Fuels the Fire of Revolution

Posted on 4 May 2026

The prolific hit-making post-hardcore duo, LAKE ACACIA, has delivered some of their hardest, hypersonic blows to date in their latest single, Tear You Down.

If you weren’t already salivating for an insurrection before hitting play, expect your hunger for a revolution to grow ravenous as you’re adrenalised by the insurgent synthesis of metalcore, groove metal and industrial. Alternatively, if you’ve been complacent about the atrocious state of reality, anticipate being slapped into your senses by the riling earworm which lays out vocal hooks like landmines in the melodic breaks and through the lyrics which resonate with piercing clarity through the mechanised, cacophonous instrumentals.

Tear You Down makes Marilyn Manson’s Fight Song, and subsequently Faith No More’s Be Aggressive sound wilted; flimsy in the face of this future-forward riot of fortitude. The bass-driven heft hits with colossal force, while unrestrained drumming, synth layers, strings, electronics and percussive textures turn the track into a cinematic demolition site with a militant heartbeat. Towering vocals rich with harmony and emotion sit at the centre, proving how LAKE ACACIA can balance brute-force impact with atmosphere. As a two-piece operating far beyond genre lines, their sound has become monolithic; far too towering for arbitrary genre parameters to cage.

Tear You Down is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Born Pessimist Twisted ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dead’ into Clockwork Baroque Theatre and Berserk Metalcore Visceralism

Posted on 11 April 2026

If no one has coined the dark cabaret trap metal genre before the drop of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dead, the honour has to go to Born Pessimist. The opening sequence turns as if operated by clockwork mechanisms, instilled with baroque theatricality; as the track progresses, the shadows over the production become more all-consuming as Born Pessimist’s bars start to sharpen their candid sting.

That delivery unravels into a frantically urgent outpour of stark truths until the single descends into industrial metalcore catharsis, running with the same feverish force as a juggernaut in berserk mode. Following the crescendo of ferocious metal motifs, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dead digs into the melodiousness of neo-classical chamber trap, with the narrative driving the mix as you come face to face with mortality and reconcile with how death has nothing on the horror of life.

Across previous releases, from the industrial rap abrasion of Shock and Awe to the lo-fi acoustic desolation of This Sunless Space, Born Pessimist has kept pushing into harsher emotional terrain while widening the sonic frame. With Aluminum now in the works, this single lands like a vicious thesis statement for whatever comes next.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dead is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

London’s Chaidura Fires Hypersonic Glitchy Metalcore at Synthetic Superficiality in the Theatrically Surreal Hit, Plastic Beauty

Posted on 10 April 2026

Genre-fusionism becomes a hypersonic missile in the latest drop from Chaidura, Plastic Beauty, an Avant-Garde glitchy metalcore riot incited against society’s surreal obsession with synthetic superficiality, which now masquerades as beauty. The London-based artist has been building a world where visual kei drama, emo candour, alt-rock weight and raw emotional exposure all converge, and in the artist’s LIMINAL chapter, that vision feels darker, heavier and more grounded in the psychic damage of comparison, control and self-reckoning.

Following a Pendulum-esque intro, mechanical metalcore intensity consumes you, and the arrangement, as it keeps throwing subversive symphonic pop and industrial aesthetics into the mix, keeping it off the keel to hold you inside the explosive yet seamlessly natural progressions. Beneath the sonic violence, the lyrics cut with blunt force, taking aim at beauty standards, self-rejection, and the kind of shame that festers when appearance gets treated as currency.

As undoubtedly one of the most talented bands in the UK alt underground, Chaidura delivers head-spinning panoramic production quality, almost beyond conceivable instrumental talent, vocal magnetism that pulls you into the core of the emotion, and, polishing it off, a savant-level imagination to envision such a hit. While too many artists are painting by numbers to stitch together reincarnations of tried and tested formulas, Chaidura is building chaotic cathedrals of noise that rain society’s rubble down on you when you step inside. It’s fucking phenomenal.

The London-based artist has already drawn attention across tastemaker platforms, and this latest release pushes further into the harsher emotional terrain of their LIMINAL era, where self-acceptance, image, and psychic fracture all scrape against each other.

Plastic Beauty is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.

Follow Chaidura on Instagram.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

The juggernautess of Dark Feminine Metalcore ripped open scars in ‘Mother Dearest’

Posted on 7 January 2026

Sa’Lunara stands as the juggernautess of modern metalcore, and with Mother Dearest, she channels her ethereally occultist approach to vindication through expression with devastating clarity.

There’s no fury like a woman scorned by childhood trauma from maternal hands, and this single carries that truth like a sacred blade. Every line is raw with furore, whether delivered through scathed screams or diaphanous harmony, especially the incantatory line, “Watch me sing your silence into flame”, which crowns Sa’Lunara as a priestess of poetry rooted in lived pain.

This is the kind of single you listen to in complete reverence, attuned to the anguish spilling through its progressions as an act of artful trauma healing. For anyone diminished rather than raised by the person who brought them into the world only to punish them, Mother Dearest lands with brutal familiarity. The track visualises vulnerability and rage with unfiltered honesty, tracing the consequences of degradation inflicted by someone who shared their DNA only to deride it. The fortitude driving the single reads as fierce self-reclamation, heavy with purpose and ritual intent.

Sa’Lunara’s ascent through the alternative metal sphere reflects a vision sharpened by occult symbolism, ceremony, and the primal feminine. Her sound fuses modern metalcore weight with cinematic atmospheres that feel conjured rather than composed, and her growing community connects through recognition rather than spectacle. With Mother Dearest, she offers a space where fury and healing coexist, forged through expression rather than restraint. This single confirms her place as an artist whose work resonates as both confrontation and communion.

Mother Dearest is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

With Memory Relapse, Saved By Skarlet rips open alt-metal with raw emotive friction

Posted on 7 December 2025

Saved By Skarlet didn’t follow the trend of opening their latest track, Memory Relapse, with an instant hook. They went straight for the jugular with an instant power riff before bringing the hammer down through the rampaging carnage that constructs their alt-metal instrumentals. As masters of melodic breaks and deliverers of more breakdowns than you’d see during a full moon at a mental institute, Saved By Skarlet proved themselves once again as savants of unhinged precision with Memory Relapse. By playing with post-hardcore aesthetics during the middle-eight and constantly running progressive volition through the veins of their release, they orchestrated something beyond catharsis.

Formed in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Christian metal four-piece has spent the last decade making their mark on stages across the US, performing alongside the likes of Skillet, Life of Agony, Wolves at the Gate, and Convictions. Their latest release, mastered by Brandon Wolfe of New Year’s Day, continues their evolution in sonic intensity, emotion, and production. With Memory Relapse hitting #10 on Billboard’s CMW Rock Charts, they’ve cemented their ability to bring healing and wreckage in equal measure.

We may never be able to fully trust our memories due to the way our minds distort them, but after this release, it’s safe to say we can always depend on Saved By Skarlet to deliver tracks that triumph by putting emotive friction at the epicentre of their sound—one that’s so raw it’s practically carnal.

Memory Relapse is now available on all major streaming platforms via this link.
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Review by Amelia Vandergast

Death Wears You Well delivered an intravenous shot of colossal rage and widescreen emotion into Unfinished Script

Posted on 2 December 2025

Few releases can be accurately described as cinematically colossal, yet Unfinished Script from Death Wears You Well earns that weight from the instant the first onslaught tears open. The Pennsylvania outfit drags you straight into an atmosphere so immersive it feels as though the walls close in while the emotional floodgates crack. Rage, longing and frustration collide in a full frontal surge, but inside the rancour sits a strange resolve, the kind that aches with purpose. Shimmers of transcendence rise through the heaviness as the band pull together the aesthetics of Alexisonfire and the melodic attack reminiscent of Bullet for My Valentine, forming a nostalgia hit for anyone who finds their sharpest catharsis in the friction between post hardcore instrumentals and the juxtaposition between screamo and harmonic vox. The track lunges forward with a cinematic scope that expands and contracts like an internal storm, leaving the sense that you’ve stepped into a fragmented mind trying to write its way out of collapse.

The members behind the project, Mike Faller, Thomas Lutz, Calvin McCombie and Herald Arturo, build each release as though they are constructing emotional environments rather than conventional metalcore tracks. They draw from metaphor-heavy lyricism, widescreen atmosphere and a form of storytelling that picks apart memory, dissociation, identity rupture and the violence of introspection.

Their sound often feels like a landscape shaped by flooded cities, decaying reflections and long corridors where echoes cling to the walls. That approach positions them at the intersection of cinematic metalcore and atmospheric metalcore, where vicious aggression intersects with something brutally human. Unfinished Script reinforces that identity with unflinching conviction, proving the band’s capacity to turn internal collapse into something immense, immersive and painfully resonant.

Unfinished Script is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Re:O Mechanised Japancore with Gnarled Industrial Groove Metal in ‘Crimson Desire’

Posted on 13 August 2025

Re:O found the intersection between Bjork in her Army of Me era, Atari Teenage Riot and Static X in their latest mechanised juggernaut, Crimson Desire. Instead of hearing cogs grind in the instrumentals, you’re drenched in cataclysmic cascades of gnarled industrial groove metal pinched with hypersonic hooks that deliver the kind of escapism only possible when your synapses are scorched by searing hot machinations of electro-metal annihilation.

With one of the most magnetic breakdowns in metal since Machine Head dropped Game Over, the track twists your system into knots as you follow the whirling dervish of sheer momentum. Tying it all together are vocals sweet and euphonic enough to counter the rancour, yet ferociously affecting enough to ensure the intensity is never diluted. Every harmony cuts through with razor-sharp precision.

Formed in 2020 by vocalist, synth player and multi-instrumentalist Rio Suyama, the Japanese-British outfit has earned acclaim for their Japancore concoction of metalcore, industrial metal, J-Pop and dark pop. After reforming in 2023 with James Wright, Jon Roberts, James Stevens and later Alex Carli, they’ve stormed stages internationally and caught the attention of BBC Radio 1 and BBC Introducing Oxfordshire. With releases like Stains on My Soul, Ronin and The Haunted, Re:O has become a formidable force, but Crimson Desire pushes them into an even darker, more unflinching arena.

Crimson Desire is now available on all major streaming platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Mondegreen Melodised Nu Metal in Their Annhilative Revival, Are You Sure

Posted on 9 April 2024

With their debut single, Are You Sure, Oxford’s Mondegreen did more than just throw their hat in the Nu Metal revival ring; the expansive annihilative aural aesthetic in the cataclysmic hit allowed the five-piece to stand at the vanguard of the movement and tear down the constructs that constrain the genre.

By feeding the juggernautical grows of the basslines, the cacophonous percussion and the sirening guitars in an ethereally intense atmosphere injected with Metalcore increments of electronica, nostalgia for Mushroomhead, and melodic vocal hooks, Mondegreen scribed a thunderously distinctive sonic signature that has the capacity to write the future of the genre.

After forming in 2023, the outfit is on a mission to deliver heartfelt lyricism through hard-hitting riffs and shake up the status quo, after Are You Sure obliterated my speakers, I can safely say they’re on the right trajectory and they’re one of the most promising new names on the UK metal scene.

Are You Sure is now available to stream on all major platforms including Spotify and YouTube.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Shrapnel unleashed the meta(l)morphosis of the year with their latest single, In Gravity ft Scott Kennedy

Posted on 8 December 2023

In collaboration with Scott Kennedy (Bleed from Within), the eclectically inspired metal monoliths Shrapnel unleashed the meta(l)morphosis of the year with their latest single, In Gravity.

All the precision, power and prowess that catapulted Shrapnel to acclaim is ensnaringly evident in the fervently cathartic juggernaut, which sonically and thematically moved with the times to acknowledge the pain, tragedy, and isolation collectively endured in recent years and to place the powerhouse at the pinnacle of modern metal.

After breaking through the chains of expectation and obligation to confine themselves to assimilating thrash antiquities, In Gravity is an adrenalized statement of intent. There’s no understating the riled euphoric energy which insurgently courses through the veins of the anthem for optimism where demons are exercised, and the past is forsaken for the present.

Between the exhilarating earworm propensities in the melodically cataclysmic choruses, the brutality of the breakdowns, the relentless dynamism of the guitars, and the flawless production by Jens Bogren (Sepultura, Kreator, Devin Townsend), the new maturity of Shrapnel is priming them to become the orchestrators of the album of the year in 2024.

In Gravity was released on December 7. Add it to your metal playlists on Spotify or stream the official music video on YouTube.

Follow Shrapnel on Facebook and Instagram.

Review by Amelia Vandergast