Chasing Fridays: TAGABOW, Rev3rent, Advance Base Q&A, more

Two things: One, I made a Chasing Sundays Instagram. Go follow. Two, I got a camera! Earlier this year, I decided that I wanted to get my hands on a "vintage" (late 2000s) digicam so I can take artfully amateur photos at shows to make my live reports in Chasing Sundays more visually stimulating. Foolishly, I donated my childhood Nikon Coolpix to Goodwill sometime in the late 2010s, and the prices for those things today are completely absurd due to the ongoing digicam revival. Fortunately, my parents scrounged up one of their old cameras while rifling through storage, and gifted me the snazzy Canon Powershot Elph 110 (below) when I was back home for thanksgiving (thanks mom and dad!).

After a bit of a live show dry spell in November, I had a busy slate of gigs this week where I was able to start shooting, and some of those pics made it into the live show roundup in this packed-out issue of Chasing Fridays. I had thoughts to share on three major bills headlined by shoegaze, electro-pop, and deathcore bands, all of which spoke to trends that I've been actively covering in Chasing Sundays. I also weighed in on an instance of shoegaze breaking containment, plugged an actually good nu-gaze song, and then did a terrific Q&A with the always thoughtful Owen Ashworth of Advance Base, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and Orindal Records.

Shoegaze is inspiring another shitty major label artist

A couple months back I wrote about this awful artist named Jutes who recently pivoted from making Mod Sun-ish pop-rap schlock to writing equally grating rip-offs of Deftones and Sleep Token. One day, when I have the time and energy to plug my nose and do the dive, I'll write about the whole economy of guys like Jutes – who's married to Demi Lovato and signed to the quasi-major label Position Music – who got a foot in the door with emo-rap's boom in the late 2010s, and have since hopped from one L.A. songwriting factory to the next, reshaping their entire musical identities into whatever sound is trending (pop-punk, nu-metal, nu-gaze) to try and game a hit. With last year's shameless Deftones copy/paste "Sleepyhead" (44 million Spotify streams as of this writing) Jutes got his hit, and he's trying to make further inroads in the alt-metal mainstream with this month's Dilworth album.

The president of Jutes' label looks like this, and Dilworth basically sounds like what a guy who looks like that would see as commercially viable in an era when Sleep Token, Deftones, and Bring Me the Horizon are driving the sound of mainstream radio rock. The music is a soulless spread of djenty R&B and moody alt-metal that's loaded with triggered drums, cheesy breakdowns, and apathetically explosive choruses that were likely written with specific Linkin Park and Evanescence tracks pulled up in open tabs. It's detritus that's not even worth dissecting just to hate on. The only reason I find Jutes interesting is because shoegaze is in his musical moodboard, and I'm always fascinated by the unusual places shoegaze has ended up at, and the uncanny shapes the sound has taken in the years since its TikTok explosion.

Last year, I wrote about how nu-metal and shoegaze became intertwined, and how the major label singer Amira Elfeky was filtering shoegaze into her clinical replication of Evanescence and Deftones. Jutes' sound isn't all that different from where Elfeky ended up on this year's djenty Surrender EP, and he makes his influences abundantly obvious in a playlist on his Spotify profile called "jutesbox." The 80-song mix is a curated blend of Jutes' own songs and others he's clearly trying to emulate, from Sleep Token's "Caramel" and Deftones' "Change (In the House of Flies)," to drowsy nu-gaze songs like Narrow Head's "Nodding Off," Loathe's "Two-Way Mirror," and Superheaven's "Youngest Daughter" (not quite shoegaze, but close enough).

Elsewhere in the playlist are tracks by other Jutes-ian figures like Maggie Lindemann, Julia Wolf, and Violent Vira. And then also songs by genuine popstars like Lana Del Rey, The Neighborhood, and Artemas. Jutes' music sounds a little bit like all of those artists, which is to say it sounds like a generic approximation of what mass-marketed "alternative" music sounds like in 2025. As anyone who got into shoegaze prior to 2023 can surely relate to, it's endlessly flummoxing for me to see bands like Narrow Head and Superheaven directly informing the tier of artists that Jutes belongs to. A realm of brazenly capitalistic pop-rock that's completely removed from the actual shoegaze underground, yet is going to great lengths to pilfer its sound and aesthetic. Such is the history of the music business, but it's still pretty trippy to see shoegaze get chucked into the mill of monied mid.

Prodigal - "Sleepwalk"

Friend of the blog Holiday Kirk, a.k.a. the guy who runs crazy ass moments in nu-metal history, DMed me this song last week and swore that it fixed the issues I have with a certain other alt-metal band with nu-gaze tendencies. I'll be honest: I was skeptical. Bands ​that evoke Deftones and Chevelle just aren't my cup of tea, and outside of some of the older Fleshwater songs, I haven't heard any modern bands reignite that style in a way that I would describe as "more than listenable." Much to my amazement, this Prodigal song "Sleepwalk" actually "more than listenable" threshold.

It has one of the laugh-out-loud goofiest music videos I've ever seen, and I wasn't totally sold on the song during its moody first verse. But once the throat-shredding chorus hits, and especially once that Sepultura groove hits during the bridge, I'm banging my damn head. It's wild to hear heavy nu-gaze with actual blood in its veins, and I give props to Prodigal for avoiding the art school pretension and understanding that this style of music needs a healthy dose of cheese to be done right.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water, Snoozer, Hooky live @ Spirit Hall

Pittsburgh finally got a proper TAGABOW set. I've seen They Are Gutting a Body of Water in this city several times, but always at venues that were too small to accommodate their signature setup: the band stationed on a foot-high riser in the middle of the crowd, aimed toward one another while the audience encircles them like curious onlookers gawking at a performer in a town square. Now, the Philly band are big enough that they've been able to pull off this arrangement in every city on their ongoing LOTTO tour, which doubles as a celebration of TAGABOW's shoegaze dominance and a showcase for other similarly cool bands in their influential orbit.

Each leg of the tour boasts a different set of openers, and Pittsburgh was treated to two of the most regionally beloved, yet still underrated in the wider scene, bands from the Philly underground. Embarrassingly, I had been sleeping on Snoozer, the long-running project of Alex G drummer Tom Kelly and his brother Mike, whose lineup is currently filled out with current/former members of Spirit of the Beehive, Sun Organ, and more. Their crushing set jolted me wide awake with a delightful onslaught of volume pounding from their three-guitar ensemble, buffing out the twangy, docile, shoegaze-tinged sound of their recorded material with some of the meatiest tones I've heard from a live band in a long time.

Up next were Hooky, a whimsically unpredictable duo whose music sounds different every time I interact with it. Last year's Mirage LP was a curious exposé of bit-crushed chillwave with shoegazey textures and beachy melodies, and when I saw them play a technical difficulty-riddled house show earlier this year, they sounded way more freeform and glitchy. Their set at this gig alternated between George Clanton-ish chillwave and songs that I couldn't even begin to analyze because the 808 bass was so terribly, terrifically loud that my bones were shaking. At one point, I heard my friend Devon mutter, "jesus," with a concerned chuckle, and I swear the bass was louder than the MBV show I saw last month. Twice between songs, Hooky unsheathed a giant katana sword and took turns tossing a banana at each other for a game of real-life Fruit Ninja. Maybe the next time I see them they'll play rage-rap and somehow recreate Candy Crush. I can't wait.

Botanical blade antics aside, the night belonged to TAGABOW. I was lucky to catch them toward the end of this tour, because the quartet were the most locked-in I've ever seen them. The new songs sounded great, and the old ones, too, but I was most impressed by their new interlude format. For the last few years, TAGABOW have famously let pre-recorded jungle beats chatter during their tuning breaks, which could either be exciting or exhausting depending on your mood and the vibe of the audience. For this set, Doug Dulgarian flicked on a light drumbeat or synth lead from his sampler, and then the whole band would join in and shape them into actual songs.

I didn't recognize any of the instrumental interludes, so I imagine they're all unreleased tracks, or maybe even straight-up improvisations, but many of them were as good as TAGABOW's actual shoegaze songs. Plus, the set flowed a lot more naturally without the antagonistically anti-rock jungle breaks. I think this crowd would've danced either way. There were two push pits gurgling on either side of the band's platform, and the group of 20-something guys next to me were really bashing each other around to the band's trudging grooves and roiling distortion. The form-breaking layout of the room seemed to keep people more engaged, and there was something special about being able to look behind the band and see people's facial expressions rather than just the backs of their heads. Even the best shows can feel formulaic. TAGABOW made theirs an experience.

Cowgirl Clue, Her New Knife, sweet93 live @ Bottlerocket

Bottlerocket is a Pittsburgh venue where I've seen many different types of bands, but typically indie-rock nuzzlers (Friendship, Florist, Advance Base) and punk groups of the less dirty and/or scary persuasion (MSPAINT, Militarie Gun). On Tuesday night, the cozy, wood-paneled dive bar was unrecognizably packed the fuck out with fitted up teenagers. Crystal Castles and Salem blared from the house speakers and fog machines coughed out smoke until you couldn't see from one side of the modest stage to the other. Most of the room was there for headliner Cowgirl Clue, an L.A. alt-pop singer who sounds like a cross between Shygirl and Snow Strippers. Funny enough, she had two hype shoegaze-ish bands opening her ongoing tour, assembling the kind of contemporary mixed bill that I wish Pittsburgh got more of.

I was really curious to see sweet93, a New York band helmed by singer Chloe Kohanski whose most popular singles "Stars Above" and "what's true?" resemble Mazzy Star and Mojave 3. The first half of her set hovered in that sort of lilting dream-pop mode. Kohanski, cloaked in a cowl that made her look like Red House Painters Riding Hood, crooned away from the audience while plumes of fog obscured her body. Eventually, the songs got louder and gazier, including one standout track that had a sinewy bassline, growling guitars, and a restrained wail that threatened to become much more. At one point, a wasted teenage girl with black and white striped arm warmers stumbled through the crowd and then yelped excitedly when the band finished playing. Another slowcore convert.

This was my third time seeing Her New Knife in 2025, and by far the best. The clangy new sound the shoegaze expats debuted on last year's chrome is lullaby EP has been fully realized over a year of constant touring. The songs are slippery and fluid, and the noise they produce is now about precision rather than atmosphere. I watched guitarist Ben Kachler stare up into the ceiling while stroking his strings up and down like a washboard. Not playing actual chords, just using them for their chimey resonance and to find a mechanical rhythm in the 50mm gaps between each pluck. People love what they don't understand, and I think that's why Her New Knife have the attention that they do right now. They're aloof and distant but not cold. Free-form and arch but still danceable. Actual musicians, not just vibe-smiths regurgitating reference points. They're doing everything right.

Cowgirl Clue and her two bandmates look like Grand Theft Auto characters. The guitarist was wearing a leather jacket, a leather sailor's hat, and ripped blue jeans, while Cowgirl Clue and her drummer were both platinum blondes in white tanks and tattered True Religions (or something similar). For most of the performance, the singer also wore a small fur coat that covered about half of her back, with flowy pink ribbons dangling off the rear that flapped in the strobe light. Most of her songs consisted of demure pop vocals, lyrics about revving engines, and squeaky electro beats with clattering bass – and kids lost their shit. The floor where I normally stand amongst flannel-clad millennials yawning into their beers was stuffed with teens leaping and squealing while Cowgirl Clue's pre-loaded setlist crashed tirelessly from one song into the next.

It didn't seem to bother anyone that she was blatantly lip-syncing. Like, not just using a backing track and singing every other line, but visibly not emitting sound from her larynx and hardly making any effort to mouth the right syllables. I didn't mind it. I'm used to seeing rappers who barely rap their shit live, and Cowgirl Clue and her band – especially the drummer – gave off enough energy to make the room jump regardless. In the brief gaps between songs, Cowgirl Clue shouted out the city and commented on how pleasantly surprised she was by the animated turnout. Musicians from her world of coastal alt-pop typically skip over Pittsburgh on tour, but hopefully word makes it back out west that the Steel City isn't immune to the indie sleaze sickness.

Psycho-Frame, Rev3rent live @ Preserving Underground

Psycho-Frame are a group of millennial-age deathcore dudes whose 2023 debut EP, Remote God Seeker, was crucial to the deathcore revival's first proper year. They embodied what I loved most about this movement's origins: open hostility to big-room deathcore. Psycho-Frame's mantra when they hit the scene was "NO SYMPHONIES, NO PUSH PITS, NO WHISPER VOX, NO GIMMICKS," and their 2024 EP pointedly featured guest spots from respected hardcore frontmen (Scarab, Vamachara) instead of the usual deathcore suspects. Psycho-Frame's uncompromising sound and antagonistically hardcore attitude was a war cry against the deathcore lamestream, where cornball bands like Lorna Shore and Brand of Sacrifice – and many of the foundational Myspace-era bands who pivoted to melodeath or metalcore in the late 2010s – had neutered the genre's violent essence with hokey midi strings, bad clean vocals, and cheeseball metal theatrics.

At first, Psycho-Frame were just a studio project writing for a small yet dedicated audience of zoomers and millennials who either weren't of-age for deathcore's late-2000s takeoff (the former) or pined for a return to its DIY-adjacent roots (the latter), back when the genre's pits were actually scary and former YouTube vocalists didn't run the scene. But then something ironic happened. Psycho-Frame were so successful at conquering their preferred audience that their popularity spilled out into the regular deathcore fanbase – people who also like the very bands Psycho-Frame formed in opposition to – and their 2025 LP, Salvation Laughs in the Face of a Grieving Mother, has made them one of the fastest growing bands in the entire genre.

The big-"D" Deathcore-ification of the small-"d" deathcore revival is exactly what we're seeing play out in the metalcore revival via bands like I Promised the World, where the resistance against the metalcore elite are becoming the new metalcore elite. Psycho-Frame's fans at this show, the Pittsburgh stop of their first-ever headlining tour, were an amalgamation of scene girls in full rawr attire, dorky teens in thrash-metal battlejackets, and bearded millennials sporting ugly sweatpants emblazoned with deathcore band logos. The Pittsburgh hardcore kids who ran the dancefloor when Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the true deathcore revival originators) played this venue in the summer of '24 weren't present, and the pit was mostly pushers and kids awkwardly shadowboxing without any hardcore style. In other words, actual deathcore fans.

A good portion of those fans were also there for Rev3rent, Psycho-Frame's younger tourmates who might end up being the most successful band in this entire milieu. The sextet are a bunch of high-school age kids from Apple Valley, California who, unlike Psycho-Frame's members, weren't even alive when Suicide Silence released their first album, yet are somehow unparalleled at rekindling the look, sound, and feel of deathcore's heyday. Their singer, 16-year-old Joshua Bailey Guard, has the magnetic aura of a young Mitch Lucker or Oli Sykes, and his bandmates all have the 2008 regimen down pat: swoopy hair, skinny jeans, garish graphic tees, and most importantly, the synchronized crabcore stage moves.

Psycho-Frame are currently the better of the two bands, and their set was absolutely brutal. Two vocalists stalking the stage, a drummer who sounded like an air raid, and breakdowns that had my nose crinkled into a permanent state of pleasure. However, Rev3rent were the more fun band to watch simply because they're so uncanny. The sound of their two EPs is closer to Chelsea Grin's early chug-fests than the quickfire technicality of Despised Icon, and while all of the motions are predictable, the execution is superbly gratifying. Guard didn't stop hustling across the stage even once, and when his mic cut out due to a faulty cable, he just dropped it and screamed into the crowd with all of his might. The deathcore revivalists belong to deathcore now, but with bands like Psycho-Frame and Rev3rent setting the agenda, at least the genre is once again in capable hands.

Chasing Down

OWEN ASHWORTH
of
Advance Base, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone,
Orindal Records

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

December is Owen Ashworth season. The Chicago-based singer-songwriter has amassed a wealth of Christmas and holiday-related tunes across his two solo projects, Advance Base and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and I love listening to them on repeat once Black Friday hits. I have a bunch of his Christmas songs saved in this Spotify playlist for easy access in the car, but Advance Base's most recent xmas tune, "Blue Christmas 2," is available on every other platform for your fireside listening pleasure. All of Ashworth's songs, holiday-themed and otherwise, are treasures. He tells such vivid stories – some intensely upsetting, others laugh-out-loud funny – with spartan analog synth arrangements and impressively frugal lyrics. He's one of the most affecting indie songwriters of this century, and as the catalog of Orindal Records shows, he also has impeccable taste.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Ashworth about his favorite Christmas song, his non-Orindal 2025 highlights, writing about female characters, how aging has impacted his songwriting, and more. Read the full interview below.

You write a lot of emotionally devastating songs, some of which are true and some of which are fictional. Is there one (or several) that you would consider the most upsetting for you to go back and listen to? 

There's a song on the last Advance Base album Horrible Occurrences called "Big Chris Electric" that really gets to me. It's fiction but I was working through a lot of old feelings and memories as I was writing it. It was a therapeutic process, as songwriting often can be, but it's such a sad song that I debated whether or not I even wanted to record it or share it with anyone. I found I couldn't stop thinking about it and the story ended up being so foundational to some of the other songs I was writing at the time that I eventually came to the conclusion that it belonged on the album. It's the reason the album is called Horrible Occurrences.

This is kind of a comment and kind of a question. But I really like how you've written a lot of songs from the perspective of female characters. I feel like that's not super common with male songwriters, and I especially like that your writing in that mode never feels male gazey or creepy (songs like "Cold White Christmas" "The Only Other Girl From Back Home" are two of my faves that come to mind). Do you have any thoughts about being a man who writes from non-male perspectives? Has doing so ever garnered any interesting comments from fans or helped you better understand songwriting or the world in any notable ways? 

Thanks, that's a nice compliment. Most of my songs are written from the perspective of different characters even if the songs are based on my personal experiences or other real life situations. Sometimes I'm trying to describe an ethical dilemma. Sometimes I'm trying to arrive at some form of emotional conclusion, to try to relate a hyperspecific kind of feeling I'm having. Sometimes it's an exercise in empathy where I'm trying to write from the other side of a situation I've been involved in, to better understand someone else's point of view.

I'm lucky to have a lot of great women in my life and I'm interested in what they have to say so their experiences and perspectives inform a lot of my writing. For me, everything about songwriting is about trying to better understand both myself and the people around me. It means a lot to me when people tell me they relate to my songs, that they're helpful to them in some way, whatever their gender happens to be.