Review Summary: Myspace is so back
I’ll be honest here, I might not be the perfect person to review a deathcore EP released in 2025 by a group of what appears to be teenagers. I haven’t listened to much of the genre in years other than to occasionally check in on bands I used to listen to, or give nostalgic records a spin before moving on to more extreme acts.
In fact, I’m such a 35-year-old Boomer that the only reason I stumbled across Rev3rent was by hearing one of their songs come across my Spotify recommendations while working from home. But a few seconds into the track “Been There, Mutilated That” by Rev3rent, I was frantically switching browser tabs to see what was blowing out my laptop speakers like it was 2008. It’s a sound that I was at one time extremely familiar with.
Millennials were the ur-generation for social media. Roughly around high school, all of us somehow ended up with a Myspace account. It marked a brave new frontier for any teenage band with access to a computer to record their music and blast it out into the world to be ruthlessly judged by hordes of other kids with rhyming Myspace nicknames.
The soundtrack to this early era was Youtube rips of Suicide Silence’s “Family Guy EP” and Job for a Cowboy’s demo, screaming along with Suffokate and laughing at Waking the Cadaver. It didn’t matter how many slurs crusty burnout metalheads yelled at us, we were blasting our music, playing our shows, stomping around the pit and loving it.
Of course deathcore has moved on since then and I ended up losing interest. It felt like the genre just became too produced, too stale and too by-the-numbers.
But then, enter Rev3rent – a six-piece deathcore band from California who released their first single just last year. Since then they’ve followed it up with two EPs and a handful of singles. From the first breakdown in ‘...With Carnage In Our Wake’ it’s clear what well of inspiration Rev3rent is drawing from – Suicide Silence, Chelsea Grin, Carnifex and early Job for a Cowboy, with a heavy influence from the first two.
Back are the high pitched screeching, the pinch harmonics, blast beats over aggressive guitar chugs and of course the almighty breakdowns. This album isn’t so much a reinvention of the wheel as a rediscovery of the genre by Gen Z. Rev3rent is dusting it off and slapping it back on the station wagon.
It’s pretty apparent upon listening. From the Suicide Silence-inspired aggression in ‘Been There, Mutilated That’ to the staccato breakdowns, starts and stops and screamed sentences preceding breakdowns in ‘Slaughter All Creation’ to the pig-squeals of ‘Shattered Skulls & Blood Splattered Maces’ this all sounds familiar for ex-Millennial scene kids.
But the glue holding this together is the same secret sauce that gave early deathcore such a sparkle: real passion. Every chord they play, beat they blast and screech they howl feels like they really believe it. There’s none of the embarrassment or reaching that many first-wave deathcore bands fell into. It feels and sounds like they’re making music for their friends. Listening to this album feels like being 18 again standing inside Seattle’s El Corazon, buzzed on Busch light drank in the car, waiting for Job for a Cowboy to come on. It rips.
There are plenty of articles floating around about the resurgence of MySpace-era outfits like the talented and extremely popular slam band PeelingFlesh who made their bones tossing critical consensus to the wind, pushing their music on Instagram and smashing venues across the country. Maybe in such an alienated, disconnected and confusing world, kids just want a place to blow off steam and connect. I won’t wax poetic too much because I’ve got a sugar-free Monster in the fridge that needs drinking and I’ve got to get back to the emails, but I think there’s something there.
I have no idea where these bands will take their music in the coming years. Will they follow the same trajectory as older deathcore bands and either abandon the genre, burn out or doggedly pump out increasingly more “mature” records? Who knows and maybe it doesn’t really matter. Right now it’s clear they’re having a blast melting faces in VFW halls, friend’s basements and underground venues.
