Long Island’s Johnny Booth are the best metalcore band around today that nowhere near enough people listen to and appreciate. If you Google their name, you get roughly three recent articles about them: one from myself at another outlet, and one from this very website. So let’s spread the good word about Johnny Booth’s second single of 2021, following the excellent and highly relevant “Crowd Control.” Entitled “Deepfake”, this new number means serious fucking business. All their releases do, really – just like 2019’s Firsthand Accounts comeback LP – and that truth persists here.
“Deepfake” – in laymen’s terms, meaning an algorithm software that replaces one person’s image and likeness with another’s – is some of the most violent metalcore going this year short of those new Dying Wish and SeeYouSpaceCowboy albums. (The latter record is out November 5th and it’s sick!) Like Every Time I Die, Norma Jean and The Chariot before their time all mainlined hardcore cocaine. Which is to say, it’s choked-full of wailing feedback, Andrew Herman’s roars, circle-pitting speeds, aggro breakdowns, incendiary and lightning-paced riffs, and Scott Owens seemingly trying to snap his limbs off with his chaotic drumming. Hell, this new song’s bridge genuinely sounds like it could’ve come off 2009’s Wars And Rumours Of Wars.
A brutal track about living in “a forever photograph“, perceptions and worldviews (like their last single) and widely-entrenched self-absorption, “Deepfake” asks the listener to be open to the idea of accepting blame. “You were at fault but you never will say it” Herman literally shouts in the bedlam-inducing finale. “Deepfake” is a nameless yet also clear call-out of those in power who will never admit to their own guilty hand in deep cognitive-societal rot. That’s something that many countries, America topping out that list, really struggle with – both in history and in the present tense. And so this is pure frustration musically embodied, demanding we see what’s currently happening in the world today, shot into your veins during barely three unfiltered minutes.
“You will dig, I will bury“:
