Here at Revolver, we pride ourselves in living on the cutting edge of heavy music, from metal and hardcore to industrial and hip-hop, and we try to keep you on the front line, too, by giving you a deep look at the innovative noisemakers poised to shape the sound and the scene. To that end, we've rounded up a handful of musicians who, we think, are on the rise across several different genres. From witchy doom to feral mathcore, here are five artists you'll want to get on now.
Frayle
RIYL YOB, King Woman, Candlemass
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Frayle take a cinematic approach to doom, conjuring up witchy atmosphere, mesmerizing groove passages and hushed melodies that hypnotize the listener into their eerie spell — only to snap them out of it with crashing breaks of cascading distortion. The Cleveland unit are influenced by everyone from Sleep and Crowbar to Bauhaus and Portishead, and they call upon all of those styles to put their own singular spin on a genre that's often plagued by redundancy.
QUOTE "Things are shifting right now in heavy music," the band members say in a joint statement. "It's an extremely exciting time to be a part of a movement that is pushing boundaries. There aren't any rules anymore. You don't have to yell to get your point across. This transitional time is a great place to live and grow. We also believe that imagery is more important than ever when letting a listener experience your band, especially given the current means in which media is consumed."
The Callous Daoboys
RIYL Dillinger Escape Plan, SeeYouSpaceCowboy, Botch
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Chaotic, spazzy metalcore is a genre that's hard to do in a way that's both musically interesting and actually listenable, and no modern band in that realm is currently more exciting than the Callous Daoboys. The sextet — who include a violinist among their ranks — earned a cult following for their joyously insane 2019 LP, Die on Mars, and their 2022 single, "A Brief Article Regarding Time Loops," takes their free-wheeling sound a step further, tossing a brutal deathcore breakdown amidst the jazzy, sassy, skronkiness with the spontaneous abandon of the Muppets' Swedish chef.
QUOTE Like any great band of their ilk, the Daoboys thrive in the anything-goes live environment. "Fest 2021 was like that, so many people just game for us wrecking shit," vocalist Carson Pace tells us. "I think I walked on people's heads during every song. I even did pushups at one point and the crowd was counting how many I could do ... You won't experience a show like us. Maybe you'll experience a band that's tighter or has a bigger audience, but there is only one Daoboys."
Gridiron
RIYL Rage Against the Machine, Cold World, E. Town Concrete
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Featuring members of Year of the Knife and Never Ending Game, Gridiron is a pandemic-born project that became a fully-realized force on their 2022 LP, No Good At Goodbyes. While the foundation of their sound is the rap-infused beatdown of late-Nineties Pennsylvania hardcore bands like No Retreat and Krutch, the band sprinkle in their own unique mix of death-metal leads, mosh parts that groove more than they chug, and impressively catchy vocal refrains with an intuitive flow. This is rapcore of the highest order, masterfully straddling the line between serious musicianship and fun-as-hell delivery.
QUOTE "Gridiron is solely based on vibes," frontman Matt Karll says. "This band was started in hopes of just having fun, and making music our friends can hit the dance floor to." That said, they were conscious about not writing an LP that could come across as a joke: "I come from a hip-hop background so it all came together naturally and nothing was really forced, and i think that's where bands get into trouble, is when they try forcing things to be a certain way."
Holy Fawn
RIYL Deafheaven, Jesu, Nothing
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Holy Fawn's earth-shaking sound does include shoegaze textures and black-metal attacks, but to call them "blackgaze" would be underselling the sheer scope of their approach. Of all the current groups mining metal heaviness to make their pretty gaziness even girthier, Holy Fawn have the biggest sound with the most dynamic impact, using wide-angle post-rock swells to build out six-plus-minute epics that soar high and crash hard like a chair-gripping disaster movie.
QUOTE "Honestly, anything in the music spectrum from pop to black metal," the Arizona group say of their collective influences. "Everything from Slowdive to Band of Horses or from Manchester Orchestra to Deftones." On their next album, out later this year, fans should expect compositions that are even bigger and fuller than their previous material. "We honestly just kept adding whatever we wanted to hear. Lots of textural work or additional layers of guitar, vocals, synth, drums, electronics, etc., just legitimately anything we could think of."
Moreru
RIYL The Armed, Orchid, Machine Girl
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Tokyo's Moreru sound like a 16-car pileup with a dollop of ice cream on top. Their songs are as abrasive as getting simultaneously shocked and shredded by an electric barbed-wire fence — deafeningly noisy, hair-raisingly shrieky and as compositionally busy as a swarm of ants decimating a piece of sidewalk chocolate. But somewhere deep in the scrum of madness lies a kernel of entrancing catchiness that keeps your ear from curling itself shut and actually makes Moreru's music deceptively easy to listen to.
QUOTE "Mainstream culture in Tokyo is basically nothing but degraded imitations of foreign countries, imitation and comedy," they say of their mission. "Underground culture, on the other hand, does not function as a counter to this. An authority of anti-authority is created, and eventually It is just a repetition of internal snobbism. Although it involves a personal grudge, our very existence needs to be a challenge to all the musicians, poets, and communities that fit into the above categories. It all starts with hatred."
