A spooky day for some spooky music. Rotten to the Core is back with a round-up of some of the best and weirdest aux-cord-privilege-losing releases from all reaches of the -core, punk, noise and sludge world.
As an aside, unfortunately this month we saw the passing of Camacho, drummer of a Heavy Blog (and RTTC favourite) Glassing. A band known for their formidable and dynamic blend of atmosphere and cathartic heaviness, his percussion work played a huge part of their sound and will be surely missed. Go jam some Glassing today.
-TB
"More than anything, we’ll miss the openness and mutual respect you had that’s become the heartbeat of everything we are. We’ll miss how unapologetic you were in your art. We’ll miss watching you try each of our weird song ideas, one after the next, no questions asked, until you were blue in the face. To you, everyone’s contribution had value. Everyone’s ideas had worth. In the spirit of Jason, we forge on. With his love and tireless approach to his craft, we return to our rehearsal space. With his road-dog energy and determination, we’ll make it to the next gig, drudge through the next tour, sleep in the next lonely hotel room, and eat the next cold soup right out of the can.We love you, brother. Rest easy." - Glassing
The Wall of Death
Maruja - Pain to Power (experimental post-rock/post-punk)
I’ll be honest — I am generally turned off by both spoken word and rapping (I know I sound like a boomer, but believe me, I’ve tried!). With rare exception, I’m also allergic to saxophone in heavy music, especially as a lead instrument. Given those aversions, it’s especially noteworthy that an album that prominently features all of the above is not only able to hold me spellbound but also able to quickly become one of my favorite albums of the year. Pain to Power is the stunning full-length debut from Maruja, a band that has steadily progressed their sound over many years but seems to have now successfully converged their wide-ranging influences into a unitary whole.
As Maruja have continued to expand the contours of their eclectic sound since their first releases, they have also continued to defy easy categorization. This was apparent in their early days on 2017’s Explicit Trickery and 2019’s Compassion, which were full of lighthearted loose funk grooves and ska staccato rhythms. Yet, those EPs leave a lot to be desired in terms of synthesizing all of the band’s disparate influences, to say nothing of their lack of resemblance to Maruja’s current sound. Flash forward to 2025 and Pain to Power finds the band painting with a deeper and broader emotional palette, seamlessly integrating their various influences, from noise rock to jazz, and stretching out their sound by utilizing the spacious and improvisational nature of their previous release, 2025’s Tír na nÓg.
With the lack of easy classification, Maruja allow themselves to explore a variety of emotions on Pain to Power, from vulnerable hope to righteous anger. “Look Down On Us” is an especially poignant track, which could just as well serve as the emotional climax to the entire album. The slow, atmospheric buildup is heartwrenching, but it leads to an explosive, confrontational climax full of untamed and conflicting ascending tones between the guitar and saxophone. As the longest track on the album at just over ten minutes, “Born to Die” floats through an unstructured but engaging six and a half minutes before the instrumentation eventually fuses together in a structured noble rage.
While “Break the Tension” is probably most similar to the sound on 2024’s Connla’s Well, the release that gained Maruja wider recognition, the following track is easily one of the most conspicuous surprises on Pain to Power. The rhythmically stuttering, squelching guitar on “Trenches” is as much noise rock as it is trip hop, but like “Break the Tension,” contrasts with the open-ended, free-floating nature of the rest of the album.
Even while Maruja reaches toward some of their influences more than others on Pain to Power, there is a keen sense that Maruja has finally arrived at a matured, cohesive sound that is wholly theirs. Not only that, but it’s a sound that allows the band to explore a range of emotions that reflect the complex and turbulent nature of the world’s current state of affairs.
-JD
God Alone - The Beep Test (math rock/post-hardcore/dance punk)
The re-emergence of dance punk, much like that of nu-metal, was not on my bingo card. Nonetheless, I’ll take dance punk over nu-metal’s overstayed return any day (sorry, not sorry). While the dance punk influence on younger bands is not nearly as widespread currently as nu-metal is, its influence on God Alone was peeking through on ETC, the band’s 2022 full-length debut. However, the band leans into it much harder on their superb follow up.
Given how prominent the dance punk influence is on The Beep Test, there’s a certain amount of whiplash that occurs throughout the first half of the album. The way in which God Alone embraces dance punk and mingles it with their math rock and post-hardcore tendencies sounds near-flawless at times, but at other times it seems as if that newer element was not integrated as well as it could have been prior to composing The Beep Test. The sequencing of the first four tracks takes the listener from full-throttle math rock and post-hardcore on “The Beep Test” and “Tony Gawk” to nearly radio-friendly dance punk on tracks like “Sir Laplage” and “Pink Himalayan.” It’s a curious back and forth that shouldn’t work on paper.
These somewhat conflicting tendencies come together much better on album halfway point “Hold Tight” and subsequently “Bluesine.” The former begins by putting the brakes on the tempo of the first four tracks. Its beginning features vulnerable interplay between vocal harmonies and a sparse clean guitar. The song eventually ends at the polar opposite with a pounding rhythm, crushing wall of sound, and yelled vocals. In between is a dense and syncopated mid-section of dance punk excellence. Similarly, “Rinser” and “Rubber Hands” start in jittery and bouncy manners but end in a vortex of distorted guitars and strained vocals.
While their previous full-length, 2022’s ETC, featured a healthy amount of bounce and bop, their sound on that album was nowhere near as accessible as it is on The Beep Test. For starters, ETC was considerably darker and suffered from a less-than-stellar production value. There’s a certain amount of murkiness on ETC that takes away from the clarity of the knotty instrumental performances. On the other hand, the bright and sunny tracks on The Beep Test, such as the aforementioned tracks “Sir Laplage” or “Pink Himalayan,” have a crystalline clarity. But this higher production value also serves the denser, more intricate, and more aggressive segments of the album considerably well.
It sometimes feels as if there are two (or more) distinct songwriters within God Alone that are pulling the band in different directions. This is not to say that The Beep Test is excessively uneven, but it does seem like there was some musical evolution that had not reached its apex before the band started composing the album. While God Alone’s sophomore effort sometimes feels like it’s a transitional album stylistically, it does not take away from the fact that the sheer quality of composition and performance demonstrated on The Beep Test make for one incredible listen and a more-than-worthy follow up to their excellent debut.
-JD
Irk – The Seeing House (noise rock, mathcore)
It has been seven long years since Irk released their debut album, Recipes from the Bible, so saying this new collection was highly anticipated would be an understatement. The experimental noise rock trio from Leeds have taken their time to hone and refine, making sure every track on The Seeing House packs a punch, and it does not disappoint.
Everything feels a touch darker than its predecessor, whether that be the aggression of the music or subject matters covered, which include class struggle, social illness, shady governments and police authority. All of these are hot topics in the UK right now, so it’s no wonder this album feels particularly outraged and generally exasperated with the state of things in 2025.
The Irk brand of noise rock is raw and unpredictable, with their minimalistic bass and drum set-up creating a myriad of rhythms to bang your head to (or at least attempt to). Opening track “Idiot Pilot” is no exception, with its nasty mid-tempo trudging basslines which at times sound like a noise rock version of Meshuggah. The sub two minute “Toothache in Prison” sees the pace and energy ramp up a notch, with the band showing off their matchcore leanings. It steadily escalates to the point of being utterly unhinged, which considering the subject matter all feels rather appropriate.
Some of my favourite tracks on this album are the slower, more leftfield offerings, which is where Irk really come into their own. “Eating All of the Apple” is a masterpiece of restrained staccato rock, with a slow build that keeps you hooked throughout, until the Tool-esque crescendo enters accompanied by the repeated quizzical vocals of “you are not a guest here!”. Then we have the bleak alleyway of a song that is “Lifetime Achievement Award”, with its layered vocals and twisted string arrangements adding extra dimensions to the already fragile yet menacing atmosphere. The off-kilter beats are unnerving to the point where it’s difficult to even tap your foot along to. KEN Mode aren’t releasing anything new for a while and this track certainly scratched that itch for me.
Good things come to those who wait, and The Seeing House is undoubtedly up there with some of the best noise rock albums of the year so far (I’m looking at you Blue Youth, Haunted Horses and Mclusky). It pushes the Irk sound forward with a distinctly dark and determined ambition, which can only bode well for the future of this talented trio and the whole UK noise rock scene.
-PK
NAUFRAAGE - Les Déferlantes (blackened hardcore, screamo)
The French have unsurprisingly been cooking up some absolutely delicious and refreshing meals in the form of distinctly emotional, dark and heavy post-hardcore of late. The flag-bearer of this scene for some years has been Birds in Row, whose last album Gris Klein I would contest is one of, if not the best post-hardcore album of the 2020s. Last month delivered a new challenger built from the same ilk, the debut full-length from NAUFRAAGE. With a name that translates to “sinking” their music is filled with a similar sense of bleakness and harrowing despair, conveyed with the cathartic passion of modern screamo. Which makes sense, because this is one of those albums and bands that skirts multiple genre lines and screamo is near the top of them. It’s raw and intense, but still has moments of that make you feel like you're in a moody dimly lit cigarette-smoke filled hole-in-the-wall late at night in the uglier parts of a French city. Whatever box you want to try to put them in, they deliver exactly what I want from heavy emotional music.
As mentioned, it’s hard not to get around the Birds in Row comparison. The half-shout, half-screamed vocals with a french accent has a weirdly distinct sound to it, but in some ways that is where the comparisons end. While the lyrics are all in French for Naufraage, you don’t need to be able to understand them to still feel them. This visceral quality permeates throughout their dynamic song-writing from the most intensely heavy moments to the softer pensive bridges and tension building crescendos. And does this ever get heavy. Not in a “cheap” way either, it’s not all breakdowns and chugs, but smothering blackened sludge-like walls of distortion and metallic riffs, comparable to the Danes in Hexis or another French band Celeste. This lends to a very atmosphere-driven approach that tosses you around under waves of heaviness. Anyone into the bleaker and darker sides of post-hardcore and screamo should find plenty to enjoy here.
-TB
The Crowdkillers
Hot and Ugly - This Isn’t Even My Final Form (noisecore)
Up until relatively recently, Kansas-based noisecore band Hot and Ugly had been on hiatus for over six years. It’s a classic story of geographical barriers and changing priorities that put bands on hold indefinitely if not leading to permanent dissolution. However, fate has once again brought this sick and twisted foursome together again to complete the recording of a collection of songs that would have otherwise never seen the light of the day.
At their core, Hot and Ugly embrace the noisecore foundation of cacophonic chords, brisk tempos, and frantic energy. So, while the noisecore label might conjure certain expectations of what This Isn’t Even My Final Form sounds like, the scope of the album goes well beyond the tropes that are normally associated with that hybrid genre of hardcore and noise rock. The stabbing rhythms and jagged dissonance of “Mingey Quimmerton Rides Again” and “Skull for Skull” certainly recall noisecore and noise rock of yore. But much of guitarist Jeff Winter’s tritone-heavy tremolo picking, as displayed in “Am I Dead Yet?” and “Dance to the Rhythm of Puke,” verges on black metal and death metal, respectively. Beyond those explorations of various corners of extreme metal, the album is littered with both unsettling and absurd samples full of pitch-shifted voices and psychedelic effervescence thanks to multi-instrumentalist Daniel Glascock.
Lyrically, vocalist Ian Cook uses vivid imagery to explore various perspectives of existential malaise. There are multiple references to blood and bone scattered throughout the songs, which, in context, seems to suggest an intimacy with the concept of mortality and our existence as nothing more than glorified animals. Cook’s lyrics and vocal delivery reflect the album’s music, which often feels like one’s sense of reality and concept of self are on a shaky foundation and are on the verge of collapsing completely.
Who knows what, if anything, is in store for Hot and Ugly after This Isn’t Even My Final Form. But if this is indeed Hot and Ugly’s final form, then what a fine form to end on.
-JD
Demersal - Vi kunne ikke blive her for evigt, vel? (screamo, post-hardcore)
Denmark’s screamo supremos™, Demersal, return sixteen months after their excellent self-titled full length showcased an ability to mix melody and aggression with wanton aplomb. Vi kunne ikke blive her for evigt, vel? (which translates to “We couldn’t stay here forever, could we?”) picks up the trail from last year's album and over five tracks dutifully explores new facets of the Demersal sound. I’m not going to be beat around the bush here; this EP is simply stunning. There are moments of brutality, beauty and everything in between, with each track displaying delightful touches of refinement. This is the sound of a band full of confidence and who are now elevating their songwriting to new levels. “Alting Fader” is the classiest screamo track you’ll hear this year, as it works its way through multiple jagged riffs before hitting you with a finale of acoustic guitar, piano and flute (I think) that will leave you in an emotional wreck on the floor. This is everything I want from my screamo, and it now means my anticipation for the next Demersal full length is at stratospheric levels…but I have a feeling they won’t disappoint.
-PK
Coilguns – Lost Love (noise rock, post-hardcore)
Odd Love was one of the standout albums of 2024, with Coilguns intoxicating blend of noise rock, emo and post-hardcore making the RTTC team collectively purr like a bunch of newborn kittens (without the cuteness). What we have here are two outcasts from the Odd Love recording sessions deemed “too negative and dark to fit with the rest” by the band. Both tracks do have a distinctly sombre tone when compared to the more upbeat approach on the full-length, so the fact that they hit the cutting room floor isn’t entirely surprising. However, such is the quality of Coilguns songwriting and compositions that even their rejects are a level above what most bands would be happy with as their lead single. First track, “Nightshifter”, is a morose look at returning home after a seemingly pointless journey, with its trembling guitars and pounding drums creating a suitably bleak backdrop for the anxiety-ridden lyrics of “nothing was worth the trip back”. This lumbering, downbeat song wouldn’t sound out of place on a Kowloon Walled City album, which is fitting as Scott Evans (KWC guitarist and vocalist) recorded and mastered this EP. Second track, “Homeworking Patriarch”, is a much more enraged offering with its stripped back intro eventually giving way to tormented wails and intermittent walls of blast beats. The final lyric of “None of your shit will make you a man” is repeated over and again to hammer the point home. These songs really do feel like veritable black sheep, cast aside for not fitting in and being too gloomy. Yet, given their own space away from their cheerier brethren they thrive and cast a substantial shadow that I’m only too happy to bask in.
-PK
brownie points - some way, we'll get there (midwest screamo, metalcore)
A surprising debut from a young new band here, and another entry into the growing trend of “screamo getting violent” - or in this case, metalcore. One of the biggest strengths of some way, we’ll get there is its ability to surprise, throwing curve balls when you thought you had it figured out. With the EP opener “greeting and salutations!” for the first half of its run-time you’re welcomed with a tasteful but standard midwest emo track complete with clean emo vocals, full of twinkly, complex riffs. By the time the track finishes, you're being rocked by a huge distorted metalcore breakdown. This is essentially the gist of brownie points’ music, swinging dynamic shifts of colliding emo jams and TTNG riffs while screamo vocals sneak in to spark more emotional weight, before the song-writing builds into heavier metalcore influence. We’ve seen this screamo/metalcore hybrid multiple times this year, but this is one of the most blatant combinations of the two, with perhaps the biggest contrast between the two ends of the spectrum they’re working with. Some may find the shifts in sound a tad jarring and forced, but the execution is strong enough to pull it off. At the very least, it’s a relatively novel approach and I look forward to what they can do with it in the future.
-TB
Soulkeeper - Join Us In Creating Excellence (mathcore, glitch)
Lastly, a great new little 10-minute EP from one of metalcore's most promising and quickly rising names, Soulkeeper! The Minnesota group have picked up where they left off in 2023 with the excellent debut Holy Design, continuing their genre-blending maelstrom of mathcore and glitch. It makes sense that this works so well, glitch is arguably the electronic equivalent to mathcore, resulting in a complex, discordant array of avant-garde music that is loud, noisy, unpredictable, yet still entirely moshable. There's bits of early vein in their sound in some of the more beat-focused tracks, with the raw passionate delivery of modern metallic metalcore acts like Chamber and 156/Silence. The riffs at times even rival some Frontierer's chaotic style making you feel like you're being horribly deconstructed into bits of computer code. Another great and refreshing entry into a strong year for mathcore.
-TB
The Circle Pit (Best of the Rest)
Editor note: The new Acacia Strain and Rolo Tomassi releases snuck up on us last week (they both kick ass, don't sleep!), but we'll be sure to cover them next time around.
Greyhaven - Keep it Quiet (metalcore, post-hardcore)
Duck Duck Goose - Love Will Set You Free (mathcore)
Underneath - In the Shadow of a Watchtower (metallic hardcore, deathgrind)
La Dispute - No One Was Driving the Car (post-hardcore)
Dying Wish - Flesh Stays Together (metalcore)
Fleshwater - 2000: In Search of the Endless Sky (post-hardcore/heavygaze)
Synestia - Premonitions (deathcore)
Deaf Club - We Demand a Permanent State of Justice (hardcore punk, mathcore)
Discontent - Processing Upheaval (beatdown hardcore, metalcore)
Befell - To Mourn the Living (metalcore, melodeath)
Serrate - Even The Wind Sounds Dead (metallic hardcore)
Sang Gering - Hidup.Semula.Jiwa (skramz)
Haexler - Talkshow (grind)
Drumcorps - For Everything (avant-garde cybergrind, breakcore)
I Have No Mouth - I Have No Mouth (screamo, metalcore)
Norse - H. (noise rock)
Art Star - Big Mouth Singers (no wave/noise rock)
Geronimostilton - Futility (metalcore, screamo)
Podré Tocar los Dientes de la Noche - Podré Tocar los Dientes de la Noche (emoviolence, metalcore)
Primitive Rage - Visions of Ecstasy (powerviolence)
Cult Member - GORE (crossover)
Facada - Truculence (grindcore)
Prayer Group - Strawberry (noise rock)
Constrict - Kadavergehorsam (deathgrind)
University - Yes (noise rock, post-hardcore)
ILESO - Corduroy (post-hardcore, noise rock)
Viile – A Bottomless Curse, A Bottomless Sea (progressive deathcore)
Extortionist – Stare Into The Seething Wounds (nu deathcore)
Thrice - Horizons / West (post-hardcore, alt rock)
Vanna – Time is Violence (metalcore, post-hardcore)
Solshade - Proxy (prog metalcore)
Catsclaw - Perfect Death (prog metalcore, djent)