A funny aspect of culture is how brief our window into it can be. For two weeks in the summer of 2005, I travelled throughout Brazil with my high school choir, singing in various opera houses and old churches. It’s a gorgeous country, with stunning vistas and people who were very friendly (and they loved if you spoke un pocito of at least one romance language and/or admitted you weren’t a fan of then President Bush).
One of my core memories was spending an afternoon with local teens at their mall and bonding over our band t-shirts. More kids there knew who Unearth and Trivium were than anyone I knew in the States. I was ecstatic; however, I knew the sample size and randomness of the moment meant my views could have been skewed. It turns out they were, as aside from some truly massive bands to make it out of there (Sepultura and Kirisun), it’s not a notably fertile land.
I’m happy to report another potentially massive group has emerged, this one with arguably the most interesting version of nu-metalcore we’ve heard yet. There are some Sepultura/Gojira influences in the riffs, but AXTY are both much beefier/darker, and happier to switch things up mid-song. Imagine the playfulness of Architects, the deathcore bounce of Signs Of The Swarm, all tied together with insane hooks. That depth was always the intention, as they share:
“The album naturally synthesizes the exact message we intend to convey. We wanted to create a soundscape that is a mix of terror and relief, perfectly mirroring the cycles of pain and resilience expressed in our lyrics. The duality you mentioned in “end this” was very intentional. We love contrasting massive, heavy aggression with expansive, atmospheric moments. We were honestly blown away by how seamlessly those chaotic, technical elements blended with the warmer, melodic hooks as the songs took shape. It proved to us that we didn’t have to sacrifice absolute heaviness to evoke deep emotion and warmth.”
“The core theme of this album is the realization that suffering is often necessary to make us stronger. We wanted to shift the perspective on pain. Instead of seeing it merely as a negative force to be avoided or renounced, we embrace it as something positively powerful and transformative. It’s about acknowledging those dark, buried truths and using them as stepping stones. We wanted to talk about the messy, painful parts of the human experience and remind ourselves, and our listeners, that those struggles are exactly what forge our resilience.”
The Pain Made Me Who I Am is out August 21 via Napalm Records. Preorder it here.
Photo courtesy of Debora Camarago
