Chasing Fridays: RIP Magic, Bring Me the Horizon live, Grace Ives Q&A

I'll start out by giving a thank you to music journo GOAT Leor Galil for kindly including me in this amazing Chicago Reader piece about Midwestern shoegaze and the genre's growth in the 2020s. It's an incredibly well-sourced and thorough article that centers around the Slide Away festival that's going down in Chicago later this month, which I will be attending both days of. I'll also be at all the Slide Away shows in NYC and LA, where I'll be doing some video interview content in collaboration with the fest. If you see me out and about at those shows, feel free to come say what's up. It's going to be shoegaze paradise.

This week's Chasing Fridays is not, however, shoegaze paradise. I wrote about a couple new tracks from the rising London band RIP Magic, who I'm quite fond of. Then, I delivered one of my gonzo live reports from Bring Me the Horizon's ongoing arena tour, which I attended in Pittsburgh. Lastly, alt-popstar Grace Ives is my guest for this week's Chasing Down Q&A. I asked her some q's about her new album, Girlfriend, as well as some other things about her taste. As of this month, I've been publishing a Q&A in every edition of Chasing Fridays for a full year, which means there are a fuck-ton of great interviews in the archive that paid subscribers can read and enjoy. Many more to come.

RIP Magic - "Screwdark"

When The Guardian deems a group "London's buzziest band" before they've even released a single song, you have two options. You can either roll your eyes and bristle against the effusive hype, or suppress every jaded impulse in your body and buy in with the wide-eyed naivete of a 16-year-old. For RIP Magic, I chose the latter. Their January 2026 single, "5words," is one of the year's best: a five-minute dance-punk rager with a cinematic climax that'd make me melt through the floorboards if I ever heard it in a club. I knew instantly that the London quartet, helmed by Marco Pini of the indie band Sorry, were special. And I wasn't alone. "5words" was produced by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and released on DFA, which is pretty much the strongest endorsement a band like RIP Magic could hope for.

Now, they've signed to the Partisan subsidiary section1 (where Sword II reside) and dropped another heater called "Screwdark." This one's a little different than "5words" but still hits all the same pleasure points: a little naughty, a lotta funky, and exuding an intoxicating scent of authentic cool. "Screwdark" reminds me a lot of the Against All Logic song "This Old House Is All I Have," in that it has brass section that screeches like a car horn in a quiet alley, bass that threatens to destabilize every precariously placed bottle in the room, and drums that grumble and growl with a lascivious hunger. I'm not going to say which retroactively applied aesthetic tagline for 2000s dance music RIP Magic will inevitably be saddled with. Because they're not that. They're what comes next.

Bring Me the Horizon, Motionless In White, The Plot In You, Amira Elfeky live @ PPG Arena

I like experiments. I like anthropological studies. I like reporting on findings. So I went and saw Bring Me the Horizon play an arena in Pittsburgh with Motionless In White, The Plot In You, and Amira Elfeky. I've spent the last couple years tracing the small-"m" metalcore resurgence in the underground while simultaneously critiquing the abysmal state of capital-"M" Metalcore in the mainstream. I regularly attend shows in the former category, but I hadn't actually seen an A-list metalcore show in well over a decade. The last one was probably Bring Me the Horizon's 2014 headlining tour with Chiodos and Motionless in White, which felt massive at the time, yet was a fraction of what I just saw in Pittsburgh: 14,000 people in a nearly sold-out hockey arena, all there for metalcore.

My goal with this show was to determine what a mainstream metalcore concert involves in 2026, when the genre is leagues bigger than it's ever been, and also older, and also, I'd argue, considerably worse. This show embodied all of those developments, but it also exposed me to some facets of the genre's sound and culture that I didn't expect. The theory I began devising by the end of the second band is that everything is EDM now. In rap and rock, vocal backing tracks have become so normalized that concerts of this tier feel more like DJ sets than "live" performances. Amira Elfeky was audibly not singing a note of her nu-gazey TikTok hit, "Tonight," and there were fills coming out of the monitors that her drummer was visibly not playing. I felt like I was watching a promotional IG reel of her show footage overlaid with a studio recording of one of her songs. That's basically what it was.

The Plot In You, a band I cannot believe are still going until I remember that Octane radio is a money-printing machine, were even more uncanny. They had numerous harmonies, ad-libs, and double-tracked screams backing up their frontman's hokey howls, as well as entire guitar leads and solos that were programmed by a computer. They play the kind of metalcore that's manicured to the point where every instrument sounds unnaturally slick, and their songs are littered with action movie trailer noises that sound like a Transformers fight scene is always blaring atop the music. I'm not the kind of purist who thinks every note in a band's song needs to be played live, and there are plenty of instances, as I heard later in the night, where backing tracks can be used tastefully. But I simply cannot fathom how the thousands of people singing along to The Plot In You weren't bothered by the transparent fakeness of their show.

Motionless In White were considerably better. Their songs are stronger, their aura is undeniable, and it actually seemed like most of their vocals were being sung in real-time. They also had a pride flag flash on the screen at one point, which elicited some cheers and also, I imagine, some groans. The wildest thing about this show is how old the crowd was. Despite all of their members pushing 40, Bring Me The Horizon are extremely Gen-Z coded. Their video game/anime visual aesthetic is acutely dialed-in to what internet youth culture looks like in the 2020s, and their recent albums are laced with fragments of glitzy hyperpop and modern rap. The exponential growth of their fanbase over the last decade means new generations of teenagers must be listening, but I'd say that 90 percent of this crowd were millennials. Including a lot of 35-plus millennials who scanned as rural and conservative; the kind of people I'd expect to see turn out for Pantera, not a metalcore band whose weeby singer sometimes dresses up as a cat-eared maid.

As I sung along to the Slipknot and System of a Down staples filtering through the venue between sets, I thought about how Bring Me the Horizon are the closest analogue the 2010s/20s have to those Y2k nu-metal titans. Is "Can You Feel My Heart?" the zillennial "Chop Suey!"? It sure felt like it when an arena full of lifelong scene kids rose to their feet to wail, "I can't drown my demons/they know how to swim," with an instinctual familiarity. Culture is so fractured and siloed these days that it's difficult to glean exactly how big and beloved a band like BMTH are until you're actually wading through their kingdom. They're fucking gigantic. And unlike most of the tuneless, swagless hucksters who inhabit metal's current aristocracy, BMTH actually deserve the throne they're inheriting.

In terms of stagecraft alone, their set was downright staggering. It began with a message from an animated alien woman who introduced the sci-fi bio terror storyline that was weaved throughout the performance, essentially turning the show into a concert/videogame hybrid with amusing narrative cut scenes playing between each song. I, too, would think that sounds lame if I was just reading this description, but speaking as someone who doesn't game or like sci-fi media or care about production value at concerts, I was highly entertained by the clever dialogue and state-of-the-art graphics displayed on the cinema-sized backdrop. When giant monsters weren't storming the screen, the multi-tiered stage platform was outfitted like a church, which included sexy nun dancers waving flags, and also lots of confetti, flames, fireworks, and smoke. It was the most extravagant spectacle I've ever seen at a rock show, and it made up for BMTH not playing any of the old songs I actually wanted to hear.

I've spilled a lot of ink on this blog trying to delineate between the hardcore-oriented metalcore bands I actually like and the Heavy Rock-oriented metalcore bands who are actually popular. The musical differences between those tiers of the genre are increasingly less drastic, but the vibe of the audiences remain a world apart. I was on the floor right next to the mosh pit at this show, and it was the tamest, dorkiest pit I've witnessed since I last attended Warped Tour. No spin-kicking, no arm-flailing, and hardly even any aggressive pushing. When I wormed my way up to the front cluster of the audience, the behavior of the people singing along and crowd-surfing was comically anodyne. I felt more vulnerable watching a bunch of scrawny screamo teenagers tussle with each other at a DIY venue last month than I did amidst thousands of full-grown metalheads being instructed to form a wall of death.

BMTH are still nominally a metal band, and I think that description is mostly accurate even with the blockbuster pop-punk choruses that float their biggest songs (the ones on 2015's That's the Spirit!). But nothing about their fan's reaction was remotely threatening. All of the cultural signifiers that metalcore still markets itself with – musical grit, recreational aggression, a simmering risk of physical danger – have been siphoned out of the live experience. And when you combine the tameness of the environment with the mechanical phoniness of a performance that's mostly backing tracks, what's left of the genre's fundamental identity? Other than a few dudes onstage holding guitars, and the fact that BMTH do write some great songs, what's the functional difference between a Bring Me the Horizon show and an Illenium show in 2026?

Ah fuck. I guess I know what my next experiment is.

Chasing Down

Grace Ives
a
popstar

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Grace Ives is an alternative pop musician who's penned some of the decade's quirkiest, stickiest hooks. The song "Lullaby" from her 2022 record, Janky Star, is immeasurably pleasing, and there are a couple songs on her new record, Girlfriend, with the same "instant classic" set of appeals. She's opening for a few dates of Olivia Rodrigo's tour later this fall, which makes a lot of sense considering Ives and Rodrigo both weave millennial rock reference points into their contemporary pop outputs. I don't know if that tour will make Ives a legitimate popstar because her music is a little kooky, a little introverted, and a little askew compared to the current crop of chart-toppers. And that's precisely why I like her so much.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Ives about understated influences, the meaning behind my favorite lyrics on Girlfriend, her thoughts on Sidney Gish, her favorite Olivia Rodrigo song, and much more. Read the full interview below – and the 50-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.