Chasing Fridays: xaviersobased, Poison Ruïn, E_Death Q&A, more

I'll continue starting my newsletter with a numbered list of updates so long as I have updates to give. This week I have several.

1). I reviewed the new Poppy album for Pitchfork. I got to induct the word "brees" into the site's vocabulary, which would've made my 10th grade self very proud (my 24th grade self is also proud), and also prove that I can write positively about a genre that I've become known for publicly dismantling. Poppy is one of the better figures in the world of blockbuster metalcore, and I appreciated the opportunity to articulate why that's the case.

2). I'm stoked that Chasing Sundays is partnering with Slide Away, the multi-city annual shoegaze festival helmed by Nothing frontman Nicky Palermo, for some promotional content surrounding this year's shows. I'll be collabing on some social media posts with them in advance of the fest's dates later this spring, and then doing some actual work at the festival itself that I'll be sharing more about in the coming months. Follow Slide Away and Chasing Sundays on Instagram to keep up. All the real shoegazers know what's good.

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3) I've also begun posting over on my favorite music website Nina Protocol, where I have a Chasing Sundays hub (i.e. playlist) of cool music on their platform that I update regularly. Nina have this new function where users can make "posts" (essentially blogs, but they can also be as short as a tweet or IG post) about music and music ephemera. I've been using it to scribble less fully-formed thoughts about music than what I'd typically deliver in a Chasing Sundays writeup, and it's been a lot of fun to see what other music nerds are posting on there. I hate writing on Instagram and don't really tweet much these days, so I see Nina posts as a great space for people who want to chat/lurk about music on a platform that actually promotes curiosity, discovery, and personality. Check out my posts and click around the site to see what else you see/hear.

This week's Chasing Fridays is emblematic of the space I want my blog to occupy. I wrote about some niche internet rap, some no longer very niche internet rap, some crusty post-punk, some crushing metallic hardcore, and then had witch house mainstay E_Death give me a scene report on the state of that genre in 2026. In some ways, witch house is more mainstream than ever, but also more fractured and cordoned off than I would've imagined. It's one of the coolest Q&A's I've run on this site in a while, and paying Chasing Sundays subscribers – the ones who keep the lights on in your favorite weekly music newsletter – get to read it. Could be you...

xaviersobased - Xavier

I was in a Dollar General when it happened. My body was buried under layers of winter wear while I paced up and down the aisles scanning for what I came to purchase. Xavier, the major-label debut by xaviersobased, was in my noise canceling earbuds, hermetically sealing me off from the chatter of the run-down store. I watched a mother speak sweetly to her son but couldn't hear anything except the foggy hi-hat rattles, muddled bass, and xav's slurred utterances, delivered with the knowing coolness of a skater who just landed a dope handrail grind on his first try. In a new FADER cover story on the 22-year-old underground icon, Ben Dandridge-Lemco referenced the zoomer theory of "trained ears," the idea being that you need to put in hours of aural exercise before you're biologically capable of comprehending the idiom of fried internet rap that xaviersobased is at this point spearheading.

I graduated from my training in that Dollar General. Not that I wasn't already excitedly tuned-in to xav's generation of vibe-rap mutants, but in the case of xaviersobased specifically, I was a little late to the jump. I had probably seen his name floating in iceberg memes alongside the many post-"Soundcloud rap" Soundcloud rappers whose monikers read like gamertag gibberish (smokedope2016 was literally his Xbox alias), but I don't think I actually heard xaviersobased's music until his January 2024 album, Keep it goin xav, earned P4k's "Best New Music" designation, which remains one of the more controversial BNM's in recent memory. At the time, I didn't really get it, and his 2024 follow-up, with 2, didn't push me over the finish line either.

At some point last year, I began to come around. In the years when xaviersobased's reanimation of jerk rap was taking off (2022-2024), I was hyper-fixated on the concurrent underground sub-genre of rage, an equally eccentric, far more abrasive style of zoomer rap that requires the same amount of ear training to appreciate, but given my background in metal and punk (and my years-long love of Carti, Keef, Future, etc.) I already had the transfer credits to graduate from that program lickety split. Rage's appeals – torrential bass, monstrous snarl-rapping, vampiric edgelord imagery – instantly clicked with my sensibilities. xaviersobased's jerk, where the beats are quicker and lighter, the ambiance cloudier, and the smeary rapping more laidback, was an acquired taste that Xavier has now caused me to crave.

A lot of the discourse around xaviersobased focuses on how weird and forward-thinking his music is, which is absolutely true, as evidenced by last year's fantastically oblique once more EP. But don't let all this "trained ear" talk convince you that the barrier to entry is too laboriously difficult to clear. Yes, Xavier is weirder and more subterranean than anything you'd hear on a J. Cole or Travis Scott record, but nothing on here is any more avant-garde than the sounds on Playboi Carti's MUSIC – viper hiss flows, squeaked-up ad-libs, beats that singe and steam like dry ice – which is an album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Except unlike MUSIC, there are no A-list features or awkward pop choruses to try and gamify streaming hits. The most conventional moment on Xavier arrives when Flint rapper Rio Da Yung OG, a relatively marginal figure by major label standards, lends his world-weary boasts to the otherwise cloudy "Heart Felt," a song that appears 15 tracks deep into the 20-cut tracklist.

As opposed to the attention-grabbing antics of the ragers, the lack of desperation is what makes xaviersobased's music so attractive. He requires his listeners come to him instead of meeting them halfway, but once you're over his property line and have allowed your suspicions to drop, you're able to luxuriate in his quiet, though no less quixotic, comforts. Not that his music lacks inertia. He just harnesses it differently. On "Wrk Wrk," one of the surefire live staples on the record, xav promises to "turn up the club on a motherfuckin' Thursday" over a beat that's laced with retro synth bloops and swift gun clicks. Whereas Chief Keef or any of his drill offspring would sample a pistol for its deadly connotations and explosive climaxes, xav's producer cranes purposefully stuffs the gunshot sound way back in the mix while keeping the snapping clip sounds upfront, using them as percussive accents that take on the disarming playfulness of a kid messing around with his nerf toy.

On that track and others like "Harajuku" and "Zelle You," you can imagine the booming bass and brusque rapping leaking out of rolled-up windows. There are plenty of potential singles on here, but Xavier functions so well as an album-length statement because every song is working toward a common goal. The self-produced "iPhone 16," with its Milwaukee lowend claps, droney synth patches, and rapping that ranges from auto-tuned falsetto wails to proudly direct flexes ("bein' smart is hard, ignorance is bliss"), is the most concise rendering of xaviersobased's artistic merits. But that track is just a tiny microcosm of what Xavier accomplishes across its surprisingly downable 50-minute runtime. Every stylishly muttered bar, syrupy bass thump, ethereal synth swell, jittery hi-hat rattle, and quivering hook coagulates into one of the most singular, cohesive, and addicting rap formulas I've heard in a long time. So go on. Flex your muscles. Train your ears. The exercise is good for you.

katmoji - Into the Tall Grass

One of the coolest things about discovering new music is digging up some random shit you've never heard with the goal of finding something totally fresh, only to realize that what you've stumbled upon is just one degree of separation from something you already knew. Revelations like, "OH, this band has members of that band??" or "Ohhh they collabed with them, that actually makes total sense" or "wait, she's associated with him??" The latter is how I felt when I learned that katmoji was cliqued up with Le Citadell, the emo-rap collective spearheaded by Swords2, who dropped an album last month that I utterly loathe. It felt like going to a newer friend's party and learning that one of your opps is the host's best chum. Awkward, but not enough to dissuade my budding relationship with Into the Tall Grass.

There's very little info about katmoji out there, but what I've gleaned is that she began releasing music in 2025, is currently based in Tokyo, and calls her sound "tweemo." I think that's a cute and not inaccurate way of describing her blend of feathery plugg and wispy emo-rap that heavily samples acoustic guitar strums and does emote a kind of twee rosiness. On a song like "Powder," her indiscernible vocals frolic alongside the spangly guitars and chipper beat claps with the wandering ease of a small forest creature puttering through the album's titular bramble. katmoji's oneiric murmurs have a little more brawn on "Pick me Up," where she's joined by two Le Citadell folk, xxffcyuvcui and Feral Cat, for the record's best display of sheer rapping ability. Meanwihle, "Lightning," a duet with longtime xaviersobased producer cranes, brings a dusky grit out of katmoji's singing delivery that reminds me a bit of 8485 without the hyperpop-punk clarity.

I could make the same comparison about my favorite song on Into the Tall Grass, "communauto." I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't identify the All Time Low-ass sample in the beat's hook, but the chord progression is dizzyingly catchy, and katmoji's murmurs fade in and out of it while she agonizes over a love that's on its last legs. I can only speculate about katmoji's influences, but this album sounds to me like a teenager who found digicore in middle school but didn't develop her own voice until she metabolized enough zoomer-gaze à la Wisp and sweet93 in the mid-2020s. The beats are plugg, the form is rap, the pathos are emo, but the textures owe a lot to the last couple years of bleary (one might even say cloudy..) rock and surrealist internet rap in the vein of jackzebra and xaviersobased. File under: Chasing Sundays type shit.

Poison Ruïn -"Eidolon"

Poison Ruïn's 2023 album, Härvest, crafted a neo-Medieval fantasy world of peasant revolts and torture chambers that was inspiring to me on multiple levels 1. The band's thematic garb of scythes and chainmail wasn't mere period cosplay, but a pointed historical analogue to wishcast a burst of radical resistance against the modern-day feudalism we're presently enduring. 2. The music – a snaggletoothed pastiche of Motörhead, all the crusty d-beat bands inspired by Motörhead, and all the gloomy post-punk that surrounded Motörhead's heyday – was dope as fuck. Poison Ruïn's whole presentation felt so lived-in that whenever I looked up at Härvest's stylized cover art hanging on my office wall, I was able to believe, even just for a second, that they're not a quartet of punk dudes from Philadelphia, but a battalion of blade-wielding farm workers with a noble bloodlust for the heads of the ruling lords.

Then, I saw Poison Ruïn live and was faced with the brutal realization that they are just four punk dudes from Philadelphia. I actually caught the band twice since Härvest, and both sets were woefully boring. Low energy, low charisma, and no attempt at maintaining the dark-aged façade that their recorded material hinges on. Metal and punk bands don't need Amon Amarth levels of stage production to be effective performers, but I expected that Poison Ruïn would do more than just stand there and mechanically play their songs without anything to distract the audience from noticing how samey their music is. The sets really dampened my opinion on Poison Ruïn. Their new song, "Eidolon," has made me a believer again.

Putting aside their visual gimmick, another distinguishing feature of Poison Ruïn was their crud-coated production. The band's run of pre-Härvest EPs were notable for how they folded dungeon synth interludes in between the Amebix-ish crust anthems, and the fact that the songs sounded like an unfinished basement was part of the charm. Sticking with that fidelity on Härvest was an artistic choice that served their broader aesthetic, but no doubt muffled the power of their riffs and muted the urgency of their chant-along hooks. Poison Ruïn sound clearer and mightier than ever on "Eidolon." Not only is the mix brighter and bulkier, but the guitar work is more exacting, the drums hit harder, and frontman Mac Kennedy's grunts have a more sinister flair. "Eidolon" is a great punk song on its own merits. The chainmail-coated figure on its cover art is just an added bonus.

Rekrucify - Demo

I can't figure out who plays in Rekrucify, but the new UK band dropped a demo last month that couldn't have been made by amateurs. Every detail on this three-song gem, from the art to the dual vocal interplay to the four-beat pause right before the mosh part in "Denimskin" (hello Shattered Realm nod) is the mark of true scholarship, which is required to make metallic hardcore of this caliber. There are several great H8000-indebted bands on the live circuit right now (Contention and Splitknuckle being my two faves), but these songs reaffirm the golden rule of hardcore: there's never enough of a good thing...if that thing has swag. Rekrucify have swag.

It's not just the quality of their playing – especially the drumming, which is utterly cracked on opener "The New Sodom" – but the way they play it. The natural push and pull of the arrangements (the bass-led bridge in that first track) and the intuitive grooves during each of the demo's many mosh parts sound intentional without feeling fastidious. The final breakdown in "Faustian Hunger" is more clever every time I hear it, a growing tower of jagged riffs and rugged beats that stack upon one another like Jenga blocks. Rekrucify conclude the song before it has a chance to topple over, reiterating the brutalist sturdiness – that combination of monolithic strength and dancefloor functionality – that makes this demo so impactful.

Chasing Down

Salem Anhedonia
of
E_Death, Internet GF, Spirit Bored

E_Death is the latest of many musical monikers adopted by the musician Salem Anhedonia, the witch house mainstay and prolific producer whose music has gained a growing underground following due to her prolific output and scenester bona fides. Anhedonia has lived in Pittsburgh for a minute now, and I'll frequently spot her out push-moshing at hardcore shows or sniffing poppers at Taraneh gigs. She's been dropping music under a variety of aliases and in a multitude of styles since the late 2010s, but in the last couple years, she's been on an incredible tear of albums that range from bleak witch house (My Daughter Will Be the Mother of God) and narcotically cursed cloud-rap (TR1LL) to whacked-out rave (Czech Hunter).

Her latest record, January's PTSD, strips away her vocals, sucks out the color, and zeroes in on a form of high-adrenaline witch house that's designed to evoke the darkness, the dangers, and the bacchanalian pleasures of a guerrilla bridge rave. Anhedonia is both a student and a master of the genres PTSD encompasses, and with all of the revisionist witch house history that's emerged amid the resurgence of Crystal Castles and the proliferation of "indie sleaze," I wanted to have Anhedonia provide an authoritative scene report on what witch house actually means in 2026. In the following Q&A, she gives a detailed status report on the genre, traces its sonic evolution in the 2020s, breaks down her recent catalog (including PTSD), shares her own personal witch house canon, and tells some crazy-ass stories about her life. Subscribe to Chasing Sundays to read the full interview below.