Chasing Fridays: Sweet Boy, Fatal Realm, Holder Q&A, more

A couple things to start with.

1. I published an interview with Mannequin Pussy's Marisa Dabice earlier this week that's filled with scoops about their upcoming album, among many other subjects that MP fans will surely be interested in reading. I'm publishing another big Q&A (with a much different artist) on Monday, so I recommend upgrading to a paid subscription so you can read all of these wonderful longform interviews I've been doing. Many more to come.

2. You might've noticed last week that the Chasing Down mini-Q&A I include in every edition of Chasing Fridays was entirely paywalled. I used to only paywall four of the six questions I ask, but I've decided to put all of those Q&A's behind the paywall from now on. It's yet another great reason to subscribe to my site for just $5/month, which grants you access to all sorts of useful information about music that's becoming harder and harder to find on a dying internet.

Marisa Dabice on Mannequin Pussy’s next album, AI backlash, burning out, and speaking up

“It was a sad realization, but I think it’s unfortunately true in this industry: at the end of the day, no one’s looking out for you except for you.”

Chasing SundaysEli Enis

And speaking of useful information about music, this week's Chasing Fridays is chock full of it. After going in on a grab bag of new releases last week, I decided to dedicate this week's issue to two subjects in particular: 1. The rise of internet-native emo and how it differentiates from how emo sounded, looked, and felt in previous eras. And 2. A check-in on the state of the heavy hardcore scene by examining brutal death metal's presence within the genre, and why Fatal Realm are the superior band of that bunch. Lastly, I wrote about a good band with a bad name, a tantalizing remix EP, and then interviewed Holder frontwoman Brie Percy about the rising metalcore/screamo band's great new EP.

Sweet Boy's car chaser and the uncanniness of internet-native emo music

I had never heard of Sweet Boy before I saved this album to my library. I only decided to check it out because a couple songs on here feature Sign Crushes Motorist (aka Dead Calm), whose stench, as I soon learned, is all over Sweet Boy's career. The Australian soloist started out making virally beloved slowcore with millions of Spotify streams, but has since evolved from lo-fi bedroom mumblings into a more searching form of post-rocky emo, though not of the kind that millennials and Gen-Xers are accustomed to (an identical trajectory to Liam McCay's). There's something...off about Sweet Boy. Not because the music's bad, because I actually think this album is rather pleasant and I enjoy it well enough. But off in the sense that I know this was made by someone who has no tangible connection to the indie/punk underground that emo, slowcore, and post-rock grew from in the 1990s, and where it was nurtured by millennials in the 2000s and 2010s.

The contrarian cloud-rap cover art tipped me off to this, and then the cloying coffee shop croons in "wake me up" were the dead giveaway that Sweet Boy hails from the internet. Upon further research, I learned he's cliqued up with TikTok shoegaze gadfly (and member of Wisp and Quannnic's bands) Photographic Memory, that one of his songs was sampled by a $uicideboy, and that he looks like Oli Sykes circa 2010. None of these factors inherently determine the quality of Sweet Boy's work, but they paint a broader picture about the references and context that inform Sweet Boy, which do have a subtle yet potent effect on the way his music resonates. The easiest way to describe car chaser, Sweet Boy's debut album, is that it's an emo record made by someone who found emo-rap before they heard emo-rock. This is an important sequence of influences.

Someone who was in middle-school (or younger) when Lil Peep died didn't experience first-hand the generational rupture of Adam McIlwee leaving Tigers Jaw to start Wicca Phase. They didn't perceive the irreversible cultural shifts that occurred when internet-native rap music, not underground rock, became the new domain for sad teenager songs sung with a nasally moan. Especially for kids who came of musical age during COVID, when the initial fervor around emo-rap had settled a bit, and when the confluence of TikTok algorithms and Spotify playlists were collapsing the borders between genre and scene, there is no meaningful distinction between GothBoiClique, American Football, and Duster. It's all just part of the same "gut wrenching feelings" playlist soup of maudlin sadboy music, and car chaser sounds like a product of this new, post-sub-genre, post-scene, post-physical space idea of what "emo music" is.

Instrumentally, car chaser's title track is a smoldering post-rock drone a la Godspeed! You Black Emperor overlaid with weepy guitar strums, but Sweet Boy sings with the stylishly achy cadence of Lil Peep, chilling the music's naturalistic warmth with a digitized iciness. The same streaming-era emo delivery is employed on "get home safe," an acoustic lullaby where Sweet Boy's delicate groans are mixed so cleanly that the song takes on the fussy neatness of Christian worship music, eschewing all the band-in-a-room crackles and earnest imperfections of traditional emo. The millennial artist flatsound, an agoraphobic singer-songwriter whose creaky, claustrophobic emo-folk whisperings took off on Tumblr in the early 2010s, looms large over this album. Except flatsound's lyrics could actually be quite loquacious, and his voice has the weathered huskiness of Connor Oberst if he was too timid to wake his neighbors.

flatsound sounds like an artist who grew up listening to actual emo bands and honed his songwriting craft with a tell-don't-show specificity. Sweet Boy, who's clearly still very young, got his musical start in the world of vibes-based slowcore (see also: Sign Crushes Motorist, i don't like mirrors, no.way.out.), and hasn't really figured out how to convey emo pathos beyond the word count of an Instagram caption. In opener "i'm scared," he worriedly asks his lover who will be there to hold her when he's gone, and then repeats the song's title 16 times in a row. "car chaser" is basically just as vague, as Sweet Boy promises an unknown subject who he "needs to stop" writing about that he'll always be here chasing cars and stars. All of the song's mournful qualities come from its presentation – the screamo background vocals, the misty plumes of reverb, Sweet Boy's dramatically slow pronunciation of each syllable – and without any illustrative text, it fails to land the melancholic gut-punch that all good emo deals to its listener.

Right now, Sweet Boy's strengths lie in his cinematically dreary instrumentals, as heard in the wistful slide guitar wails of "nothing on you" and the shoegazey crescendo of "open my heart," where a sample of blaring ambulance sirens adds a welcome blip of urgent dread to this album's narcotized performance of angst and desperation. Despite all of these criticisms, I do think Sweet Boy is onto something interesting here, albeit one that I feel Dead Calm realized more enjoyably with last year's Keep Moving. As the TikTok-driven fever for shambling, homemade slowcore begins to break in the second half of the 2020s, we'll be witness to many second act attempts by the musicians in Sweet Boy's milieu, and it seems like emo – whatever that means and sounds like in 2026 – is an aspirational pivot for some of these figures. If I may offer a suggestion to those who choose this path: form an actual band, practice as much as you can, and translate the chemistry of those interpersonal relationships into your recordings. Trust me. It'll sound better.

Brutal death metal bands have infiltrated hardcore. Fatal Realm are the best one

It's been almost two years since Torture, a one-man slam-metal act, quickly became the hottest new band among hardcore's spin-kicking infantry. At the time, I wrote that Torture's organic blow-up said a lot about the state of the scene, specifically that a metal band – one who only resembled hardcore in the sense that they were DIY and played breakdowns – were more beloved by heavy hardcore fans than anything that remotely sounded like Cro-Mags or Strife. Last weekend I stood in a venue for nine hours watching some of the trendiest bands in hardcore inspire people to beat the living shit out of each other. The show, a one-day Pittsburgh festival headlined by Haywire, was a useful barometer for clocking what's changed and what hasn't in the 20-ish months since Torture's takeoff.

What's remained the same? Hardcore kids love fight metal more than traditional hardcore. What's different? Torture no longer feel relevant to this world. Torture's 2023 album Enduring Freedom hit the scene right when several other slam bands, particularly Peeling Flesh and Snuffed on Sight, were claiming a youthful audience in the shared territory between hardcore and deathcore fans. Since then, Peeling Flesh and Snuffed on Sight have become huge, whereas Torture's popularity has tanked. Torture's come-up was so swift that their ceiling initially seemed limitless, but it felt like their 15 minutes were already waning by the time I saw them in April 2025, at a show where they were billed as the headliner yet clearly not treated as such by a disinterested crowd. Later that fall, Torture released two new albums that I didn't see a single person in hardcore ride for, perhaps because Torture were no longer seen as cool by then, but more likely because neither of them, despite their noble political content, were very good musical statements.

Later this spring, Torture will return to Pittsburgh opening for a tour that's headlined by Snuffed on Sight and directly supported by Final Resting Place, a band whose initial rumblings shook hardcore around the same time as Torture, but who've proven to be a much more durable presence within the culture. Unlike Torture, who were basically treated like a hot-then-not novelty act within hardcore, Final Resting Place are part of a bigger undercurrent of hardcore-influenced brutal death metal bands who've come to occupy a significant portion of the genre's real estate. Most of FRP's lineup also play in their sibling band Discontent, who I prefer to FRP for minute reasons that I frankly struggle to articulate. I just like them better. Then there's Cross of Disbelief, the fast-rising Hudson Valley band who play a sleeker, more technical version of bdm-indebted hardcore that, if we're being really pedantic here, is actually closer to first-wave deathcore.

And last but certainly not least there's Fatal Realm, the Hudson Valley trio fronted by Mindforce guitarist Mike Shaw who, on the strength of a demo, a single, and their "members of" clout, have also become one of the biggest entities in this movement. I saw all of these bands lay waste to the dancefloor last weekend, and the biggest takeaway I had from witnessing a lineup that will surely be viewed as a moment in time 10 years from now is that Fatal Realm are far and away the best of the bunch. They have the best songs, the best players, and the best shot at being remembered as one of the greatest heavy hardcore bands of their generation. Because they are. I've loved Fatal Realm since the demo dropped in 2024, but seeing them in Syracuse earlier this month and then again in Pittsburgh last week, and listening to their music a shit-ton in the interim, has clarified why I think they're the superior band in their growing wing of the hardcore zeitgeist.

While Fatal Realm certainly benefit from being older musicians with years more experience than their peers, they also benefit from having ideas (plural) about what their band should be. Final Resting Place and Discontent have an idea (singular) of who they are, and though it's a vivid idea, it's a limited one. They have their schtick – smudgy production, indecipherable vocals, brooding low-end, cool logos with snazzy colors, and relentless to the point of sounding mechanical mosh parts – and all it takes is hearing 30 seconds of any one of their songs to understand their whole ordeal. Redundancy can sometimes be a feature for a style of music that's created with the sole purpose of triggering neanderthalic combat impulses, but I'm of the mind that hardcore is at its best when it aspires to be more than just chum for the dancefloor. To me, FRP and Discontent are head-empty face-maul music. Fatal Realm, on the other hand, are enlightened face-maul music.

Most of that is due to Shaw being a brilliant songwriter. Fatal Realm's latest track, "Of No Consequence," is an actual song – not just a patchy ragdoll of mosh parts – that carries the listener on an interesting journey from one idea to the next. Fast blast beats and a whirring riff plough forward and then pull back for a funky bassline break – no doubt inspired by Candiria – that's eventually followed by a lumbering mosh part with a great gang chant ("YOU ARE OF NO CONSEQUENCE") that then zippily concludes with a stylish little thrash vamp. Nothing feels repetitive. Every part has a purpose. Each track on Fatal Realm's demo also has its own brain-bashing mosh part, but that alone isn't what makes them so re-playable. It's the concussive grooves, the spikey riffs, the varied dynamics (specifically how they use empty space), the shoutable lyrics, and the way the band keep you guessing at every turn. Right now, my favorite moment is the breakdown finale of "Descent to Suffer" when the guitars pare back so the bassline can flutter like legs dangling above a gallows platform. It's nasty, it's stylish, but best of all, it's smart.

At the top of 2025, I questioned if the rise of bands like Torture and Final Resting Place marked the final frontier for hardcore's years-long quest to conquer heavier, more metallurgic lands. "How can hardcore get any heavier than this without becoming something else entirely?" I wondered aloud to anyone who'd listen. I still don't have an answer to that at the start of 2026, but going by what history has showed us about how quickly trends move in hardcore (two years is a pretty typical half-life), I'd reason that we're currently living through the peak of brutal death metal's Coolness among the engine of influencers and tastemakers who drive hardcore forward. By the end of this year, I think whatever comes next will be rearing its head in the underground, and at the conclusion of 2027, some of these bands will be looked back upon as flavor-of-the-week has-beens. However, I'd be willing to bet on Polymarket odds that Fatal Realm will endure the shifting winds. Bands this great don't just fade away.

Zachshots - "Von Bismark"

I was really hesitant to listen to this band because their name puts them in the Ritt Momney category of bad brainrot puns, but now I have to hang my head and admit that I'm endeared by a band called Zachshots. The NYC duo's catalog consists of a single, an EP, and a split with The Dallas Cowboys, the NYC screamo-sleaze goofballs who draw equally from The Radio Dept. and I Set My Friends On Fire. Zachshots, whose two members, Zach and Annika, also play in the great emoviolence band Cash Only Tony's, have a similar sense of humor, but their music isn't nearly as zany. In fact, they write earnestly cute twee songs about riding bikes ("Citi Bike") and deigning to date a "Williamsburg Bitch" who's known for "acting in movies that end up on reels."

I like all three songs on last year's Zachshots EP, but my favorite is "Von Bismark," a playful acoustic duet where the two singers click together their voices to make Moldy Peaches-esque harmonies and then disconnect them for a round during the Mobo-ish outro chorus. There's nothing laptopy about this twee, but lines about being "way too goated now" keep it anchored in the digital lexicon while still channeling the notebook-doodle cutesiness that Beat Happening would be proud of. If I was building a playlist of twee-ish NYC duos with embarrassing names, then Zachshots and Sex Week would make a good foundation.

Maria Somerville - Luster (Remixes)

I was cooler than most critics on Maria Somerville's 2025 LP, Luster, the trendiest dream-pop album of the year. I just didn't get it. The songs sounded pretty but felt empty. I gave it a few tries and it never clicked. It still hasn't, but my opinion on Somerville has warmed quite a bit since then. I saw her open for My Bloody Valentine in Dublin last fall, and her set was absolutely incredible. Her three-piece band sounded 10 times more powerful, gauzy, emotive, and shoegazy than the recordings on Luster, and the intricacies of her sound were made fully apparent to me in that setting. Also, by speaking to local heads around Dublin, I learned that Somerville is something of a patron saint of coolness in that scene, a figure whose authentic artistry and cutting-edge taste is a connecting point between Dublin and the global scene of ethereal-rock aesthetes.

The Luster (Remixes) EP that dropped this week underscores that Somerville does indeed have fantastic taste, and that she sees her work as part of a cross-genre, cross-generational galaxy of impressionistic musicians, not stationed in isolation off on planet dream-pop. The reworks by UK electro-gaze pioneers Seefeel and Australian dream-pop innovator Fatshaudi are right on the money, but I'm most intrigued by how Haunted Mound members oscar18 and Asa Nisi Masa flip the dainty "Corrib" into an unrecognizably sinister witch-house joint. Moreover, Boris's remix of "October Moon" sounds like Broadcast's "Hawk" turned blackgaze, and YHWH Nailgun's steely "Violet" flip traps Somerville's ghastly figure in a chamber of rattling chainmail. Like last year's Smerz remix album, all of these versions breathe new life into a record that I wanted to like more than I actually did.

Chasing Down

Brie Percy
of
Holder

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

We're finally hearing new music from Holder. The Massachusetts band dropped their debut EP on Ephyra Recordings in the summer of 2024, but it wasn't until I began seeing bonkers live footage all over my timeline in early 2025 that I got what this group are going for. As I've covered extensively on Chasing Sundays, there are a ton of young bands out there fusing metalcore and screamo in creative ways, and Holder are among the best. This new two-song EP, Ruin the Best of Me, marks their first recordings with vocalist Brie Percy on the mic, who joined the band shortly after their debut and has been instrumental to their come-up on the live circuit. Her strained growls are perfectly suited for these new joints, which oscillate turbulently between stormy screamo outpourings and bludgeoning metalcore breakdowns. Right where Holder excel.

For this week's Chasing Down interview, I asked Percy about her time in Holder, the direction of these new songs, splitting time between metalcore and screamo, her favorite up-and-coming bands, and more. Read the full Q&A below.