Chasing Fridays: Final Resting Place, 9Million, Circle of Dead Children, more

Hey what's up not much how are you pretty good cool alright let's do this. Yeah...it's been another week of brain-breaking and soul-shattering current events, and yet another week where music was what I reached for to drown it all out. I ended up going long on Title Fight's Hyperview: an album I've never liked yet am immensely fascinated by in regards to how it's molded shoegaze and hardcore over the last decade. An article I wrote last month for the Pittsburgh City Paper also went live this week. It's about three young shoegaze bands – Gina Gory, James Castle, and Forty Winks – who are following the lead of Feeble Little Horse and putting Pittsburgh shoegaze on the map in a meaningful way.

For this article, I wrote about a new release by the trendiest non-hardcore band in hardcore, Final Resting Place. I also reviewed new projects from Solvent OS and 9Million, and then went in on the 1999 debut by Pittsburgh brutal death metal/grind legends Circle of Dead Children. That latter section belongs to the new-to-2025 segment of Chasing Fridays where I write about an older record I've been spending time with. That portion of this newsletter is for paying subscribers only, so you can toss me $5/month to read that and any other paywalled content on my site. I wouldn't be able to dedicate as much time as I do to Chasing Sundays if it weren't for my paying subscribers, so if you like my writing and can afford to support me monetarily, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Final Resting Place - Bound By Affliction

There's a tour coming up this spring that hasn't even happened yet but already feels legendary. Torture, Balmora, Sanction, Final Resting Place, and Azshara trekking around the U.S. together under the banner of Daze Records. I really can't think of a better snapshot of where capital-"h" Hardcore is at in 2025 than that grouping of bands hitting the road together. Throughout 2024, slam-metal mosh machine Torture and ass-beating metalcore revivalists Balmora each became two of the buzziest bands in hardcore. That says so much about the genre's current appetite: mosh parts over everything, metal's cooler than punk, and deathcore is a-OK. Some of the most intense live reactions I've ever witnessed were for Balmora and Torture sets, and as I predicted before heading to FYA Fest in Florida last month, Final Resting Place's set was also one of the weekend's highlights.

The East Coast death metal conglomerate features members of hardcore acts like Scarab, Simulakra, and Sanction, and their 2024 debut EP, Prelude to Extinction, quickly took off among heads and head-crackers. Musically, Final Resting Place make old-school East Coast death metal in the vein of Suffocation and Internal Bleeding. The vocals are so deep and gurgly that the lyrics might as well not exist. Basically every section is a chuggy mosh groove. It's dancing music. That's it. That's what the vast majority of hardcore fans want these days. And that's exactly what Final Resting Place's second EP, Bound By Affliction, provides.

Like their last release, the production quality is intentionally cruddy – blurry guitars, ugly snares, vocals that are mixed a few decibels lower than they need to be – in order to give the project a vintage feel. Fatal Realm took a similarly lo-fi approach on their 2024 demo (my favorite hardcore release of last year), but Final Resting Place's aesthetic is even more crudely stylized. I also think the music is substantially less interesting than Fatal Realm's. I don't know the specific influences Final Resting Place are pulling from on Bound By Affliction, but it's obvious that their music is a genre exercise. The art, the production, the fact that they timestamp their EPs to the 1990s (this one supposedly dropped on 4/20/99, which I do think is a hilarious bit) underscores that so much of their band's ethos is to dog whistle at other brutal death metal nerds who understand the subtle reference points. It's as much a secret handshake as it is an original statement.

As I've written before, genre pastiche like that isn't new to hardcore, and I'm by no means opposed to it. Many of my favorite hardcore bands are pulling from very specific eras or strains of hardcore, and so much of what makes hardcore a fun and unique culture is how reverent the genre is for its ancestors, and how the genre's history is constantly being retold through borrowed iconography, phrases, and sounds. Genuinely, I think that shit rules. I just don't think Final Resting Place's music offers anything more than nods to their references and an implicit order to hit the dancefloor.

I love seeing this kind of shit live because kids go apeshit to it and the pit becomes a cinematic spectacle. But as recorded music, these songs are painfully redundant and utterly flavorless. Fatal Realm's demo has oodles of memorable riffs, mosh parts, and yes, even lyrics. Torture's lyric-less music is at least sonically punctuated enough – and also absurdist – to make for a compelling listening experience. Final Resting Place's music has never felt like anything more than drudgery to get through with headphones on. Live, though, it's a totally different experience.

Solvent OS - Panacea

On last year's A Country Western album, Life on the Lawn, the Philly band cleansed their palate of the electronic flourishes that peppered their previous releases, landing on a back-to-basics indie-rock sound that was sturdy and reliable, albeit not very exciting. With his Solvent OS project, A Country Western member Paris Parker is taking the opposite tact. Following 2023's Clickbait Manifesto album, Solvent OS returned last month with a new record called Panacea, a peculiar batch of slippery sampledelica, watery ambient, and dank electronic pop. It sounds like a nonexistent Spirit of the Beehive remix album, or the bridge between Boards of Canada and any artist who's ever dropped a project on Julia's War. ​​​It's definitely not shoegaze, but is most certainly steeped in all the genres surrounding shoegaze in its current, genre-agnostic iteration.

At a shaggy 45 minutes, Panacea has ample time to drift from one idea to the next, ramping up into a drum-and-bass squabble for a few minutes, and then de-crescendoing into oblique ambience for the next couple tracks. Songs like "Riotpilled" and "Spider" most resemble the slowcore/shoegaze beginnings of A Country Western, as heady basslines stretch like fiber-optic cables through the refracted guitar strums, and Parker's meek sing-song vocals just barely peer out of the mix. Meanwhile, "Jud's Song" is like if They Are Gutting a Body of Water covered Alex G's "Judge." It's tracks like those where Solvent OS sounds the most confident and focused, whereas the electronica songs can sometimes feel elementary and imprecise. "Permathaw," a bobbing, blooping descendent of Aphex Twin, is a bright exception. Altogether, Panacea is vibey and solidly enjoyable. Give it a whirl.

(My apologies for linking the above songs on Spotify instead of YouTube or Bandcamp, but I literally cannot find this record on YouTube or Bandcamp. Solvent OS, if you're reading this: please upload to YouTube and/or Bandcamp!)

9Million - When the Kissing Had to Stop

Are 9Million the coolest band in shoegaze? Maybe. Are they even a shoegaze band? Maybe. I've been impatiently waiting for the Toronto crew to follow up their 2023 Gush EP with a more substantial offering, but they just keep doling out two-songers. Last year's Lucky a/b single was promising, but WTKHTS exhibits the potential I think this band has to be modern vanguards. The title-track, "When The Kissing Hast to Stop," has it all: effortless masc-femme vocal swaps, Dinosaur Jr. distortion surges, a hellraising guitar solo, and drums that punch so hard that you won't even hear your neighbor's agonized pleas to turn it down. And you better not touch that volume dial, because "Feel It (All Around Me)" is a swelteringly sexy industrial pop song that's like if Massive Attack made Low's Double Negative.

What I love most about 9Million is how they feel acutely tapped-in with the shoegaze zeitgeist while also doing their own thing entirely. It seems like every other relevant 'gaze band is either on Julia's War or vying to be, but 9Million are weird and eclectic in a way that's distinct from the Philly sound/look/vibe. They're more rock 'n' roll than most of their downer American peers are interested in and/or capable of being, and they're not hiding behind lo-fi production to mask shoddy playing or fall back on a lazily casual sonic aesthetic. Moreover, there's a brisk levity in their sound that comes through on "When the Kissing Had to Stop" that I'm not hearing in most American groups. It also helps that they have seven fucking members, so all of their songs sound robust and vivid. Don't – I repeat, don't – sleep on 9Million.

Subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month to continue reading the final segment of each Chasing Fridays column, where I go in on an older record that I've recently been spending time with.

Circle of Dead Children - Starving the Vultures

Something I love about heavy music is how much the extra-musical elements add to the artistic experience. Sure, good cover art is always important, but with metal or hardcore records, good art – or even art that's bad in a good way – can make or break an album's value. The same goes for band names and record titles. Extreme music is, even at its best, usually pretty one-dimensional. Its goal is to overwhelm your senses with imposing noise. Whether its grindcore, powerviolence, brutal death metal, or even regular hardcore, the primary aim is always heightened sensation via overstimulation. Therefore, aspects of the presentation like cover art, titles, and even the band's fashion sense are weighted differently in metal than they are in, say, indie-rock, where the music itself is generally more nuanced (lyric and melody-forward, dynamically diverse, temperamentally varied). In extreme metal, one brutal death metal record might have more or less the same effect on your ears as another, but since the former has better art or a more interesting title, it feels more compelling.

I don't think I love Starving the Vultures by Circle of Dead Children because the music is particularly exceptional. I do think this record is a ball to listen to, and I think it finds a clever sweet-spot between brutal death metal, grindcore, and even stray flecks of crusty black-metal ("Where the Hive Hangs," specifically). I love this record because it's by a band named Circle of Dead Children. And because the album is called Starving the Vultures. Take a second to re-read those sentences and think about what they actually mean. What images they conjure. Circle of Dead Children is an utterly wicked band name. It's not going for gory, blood-curdling shock value. It's just fucking haunting. A group of deceased kids lying in a circle. How did they get there? Are they maimed or are their bodies still intact? It's the kind of name that guides your mind to dark places rather than spelling it out for you.

Starving The Vultures, by Circle Of Dead Children

14 track album

Circle Of Dead ChildrenAmanda Kauffman

Starving the Vultures has even graver implications. A scenario in which there aren't enough carcasses for the vultures to feast on. Is it because no one is dying? Or because the dead are instead being disposed of in a different manner before nature's trash collectors can get to them? Once again, fucking grim. Then there's the cover art. This is a prime example of cover art that isn't good, but it's "bad" in a way that perfectly suits the music, which in turn makes it good. I don't even know what's happening in this image. Some kind of fiendish bald critter looks like it's being consumed by a blob-like worm monster. The band logo is incomprehensible (as all good grindcore logos are) and I like the smudgy white patches at the bottom that have the title laid over it in ill-suited typewriter font. It looks like someone started making a cover for a metalcore or screamo album and then gave up a quarter of the way through and started refashioning it as brutal death metal art. It reeks of 1999 in a really charming way.

I also like Circle of Dead Children because I live in Pittsburgh, and this band were from Pittsburgh. It doesn't appear that they've played live in well over a decade, and their last record came out in 2010. I haven't listened to many of their other albums. I've returned to Starving the Vultures a few times over the last year because I stumbled into it while researching Pittsburgh hardcore (and hardcore-related) music last spring, and was really impressed with what I heard and saw. The second track, "Eldorado," has a groovy mosh part that would set a room ablaze (especially one in Pittsburgh) if Circle of Dead Children played it in the present day. I would make a point to go to that show, but I'm more interested in one day owning Starving the Vultures on vinyl. So I can look at its cover and re-read its title and smile macabrely every time I see the band name Circle of Dead Children while flipping through my record collection.