Genre is dead. This assertion isn't new. We’ve been heading in this direction since the days of tape trading, but I can’t get this thought out of my brain after seeing Portrayal of Guilt, Taraneh, Rabbit, and Heretic Bodyhammer at TV Eye in Brooklyn on February 1st. The heavy scene has been replete with references since overdrive was invented (I dare you to describe a doom band without mentioning Sabbath), yet the stand-outs are entirely original regardless of how much they drip influence (see: Sleep). I’m certainly not the world’s most discerning critic.
If you make music that’s heavy, I probably like your band. But I don’t push my grubby fingers against the keyboard to rate a show; I write to find the meaning in the evolution of heavy music’s allure. “Genre”, the thing I used to (still) debate about until I landed on the most specific micro-genre, matters less than ever. Genre is now a tool of description with endless combinations; a running list that meanders between type, reference, locale, and individual. Regardless of how many hyphens you add to any category, genre today ultimately falls short of one’s experience of a band. And that, to me, is what makes this scene so fucking good.
Kicking off the night was Heretic Bodyhammer, a trio of Brooklynites both visually and sonically stunning. Donning some of the most wonderfully egregious arm spikes I’ve ever seen along with face-covering reflective glasses, guitarist Velvet Worm bestowed fiery solos that teetered between the lo-fi hypnosis of black metal and buzzsaw-laden death metal. Accompanying him, to his left, was bassist Giltné whose stoic, unmoving visage was only broken by her hypnotic fingers crawling up and down the neck of her instrument in perfect timing with drummer, Tombiosis.
And let me tell you about Tombiosis: the energy, the faces he made, and the vocals he vomited existed somewhere between his throat, stomach, and the back of his tongue. All of this was simply Heretic Bodyhammer. If you haven’t heard Heretic Bodyhammer I’d love for you to write to me personally and describe their sound. Sticking to my guns that everything is referential but entirely unique, I can’t help but hear early Bathory, Spectral Wound, and Haunting the Chapel-era Slayer. It’s a heaping portion of metal served both black, sludge, and death.
With the mind expanded beyond the need for category – let’s chat Rabbit. Rabbit has been haunting the NYC everything-heavy-scene since 2022. If you haven’t heard them, or seen their visual representation, consider what a metal band called “Rabbit” conjures in your dome. Now go look at their visual identity on bandcamp. Beautiful, unsettling, elsewhere. A mix of mid-20th century surrealism, neo-American traditional tattoo, and gothic imagery – it all sits somewhere between San Jose hardcore, and new school dark wave. The only thing that makes me feel centered as a metalhead when it comes to Rabbit is their symmetrical unreadable logo, solidly referential to the long tradition of the mold-spreading fonts of second wave black metal.
Everything about this band is a red herring because once you get into their sound you realize that none of these references get to the core of what they are. They are Rabbit, and to see these guys perform (embarrassingly a first for me) was nothing short of a distillation of that originality. “Blackened Hardcore” is certainly helpful in understanding this band, but it still feels like it’s not enough. We’ve heard the reverb on the vocals before, felt the violence of the pit, and seen lead singers throw themselves head first into the maelstrom. Rabbit of course do all of that, but none of it feels like adherence to expectation. Sending each other off in their first song with a kiss between lead singer, Andre and Zack on guitars, there’s an immense sense of fun with this band. That kind of tension, whether lived or a sense of allyship to be tossed back at the very queer Brooklyn crowd, was a welcome sight in a “genre” so wrought with masculinity.
Their sound only adds to the cognitive dissonance that aids in separating Rabbit from their contemporaries. Disgusting tone, rhythms that are broken by the screeches of Andre as he literally walks on the heads of the crowd, and the pure beatdown rhythm of Mike on drums. It’s all there, but it’s uniquely not Scalp or Gulch despite those allusions being undeniably helpful in description. Add Andre’s Dying Fetus hat in both the new school tree root logo and mid 2000s stamp-style name – it’s a lot to put together. The totality of it all is Rabbit as both a noun and adjective. Rabbit is rabbit.
And here’s where my thesis takes a small break – thank god for Taraneh who offered me a sense of stability amid my mental crumbling caused by genre agnosticism. 90’s heavy pop rock with a twinge of industrial and nu metal, “Taraneh” is Persian for “Melody”, and my god did they deliver in spades. One part Courtney Love, a dash of Boy Harsher, and dare I say Evanescence? Okay I take it back – Taraneh is just as hard to pin down as the rest of this lineup, but a journey into a different form of genre-bending was so incredibly welcome. Hip hugging denim and g string abound, Taraneh took the stage with the confidence of a early 90s riot girl who just crashed her drop-top Jetta directly into the green room, crawled over the windshield and immediately broke the collective heart of the audience with her mic.
The poppy, sexy vibes of the late 20th century was something I haven’t seen much of, especially when situated between two sweaty-boy outfits. With the band comprised entirely of baggy jean’d, Doc Marten wearing, long haired (both curly, wavy, and straight) bois, it was such a joy to see a band with a legitimate clean vox frontperson; a personality that ties the entire group together in a way that is both the eclipse and the glue to the rest of the band. I think Taraneh may be aware of this as she donned a homemade shirt with presumably the name of each band member, hers being the last listed.
With that said, it was time for the night’s headliner: Portrayal of Guilt. When I first heard these guys on their split with Chat Pile I saw them described as “blackened screamo”. That may have been accurate in 2021, but our brains have been deflated, filled with terror and hope dozens of times over, and rotted by internet slop since then. So in the cursed year of 2025 Portrayal of Guilt is something entirely different. Oathbreaker, Converge, “a band that would definitely be on Deathwish” – yeah sure, these are all helpful, but as of writing I am still at as much of a loss of words for PoG as I was four years ago. Taking the stage with stone-cold seriousness, the band had no time for hellos.
Immediately following the industrial trauma of “Christfucker”, the band immediately dropped into “Sixth Circle”. To hear the hi-end twang of the Matt King’s guitars amid the bone shattering overdrive of Alex Stanfield’s bass and James Beveridge’s bell ride is something special. That's right: "twang". It’s so immensely big and utterly one of a kind, one can’t help but feel a deep burning of emotion from places unknown. How did they conceive of this sound, and especially end with a product as locked-in and tightly knit as this? It’s the amalgamation of pure emotion into musicianship and – big shout to the sound guy here – perfect levels.
The arrhythmic percussion of “Burning Hand” from their 2023 EP, Devil Music is yet a further example of their mastery of space in their music. For as many shots as I got of Matt King’s hand blurring past the bridge of his guitar and James wailing on the snare, there are breakdowns in that track that are nothing short of jazzy. And the chorus effect on the guitar? There is nothing like this in metal right now. In fact, when I went to post some shots the next day, I tagged a shot of James with “the best drummer in metal” – why did I feel so wrong calling PoG a metal band? How can a single band be both “blackened screamo”, “sludge”, and feel appropriately captured with “jazzy”? I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer, which I also firmly believe is unimportant. The only thing that’s clear from this showcase of excellence is that very little in the scene today is derivative despite sounding like so many other contemporaries. You cannot describe any of these bands without honing in influence as adjective, including a band’s own name when it comes to description. Portrayal of Guilt sounds a hell of a lot like Portrayal of Guilt.
