Like electronica, metal is an umbrella term that contains multitudes of micro-genres. How do you fancy sludge, blackened crust or funeral doom? And that’s just scraping the surface. One of the more common ones is metalcore, a portmanteau word for the heaviest metal crashing into hardcore punk. A rising band in this category is São Paulo’s AXTY whose fourth album is as inventive as it is apoplectic.
They’re a three-piece, with frontman Felipe Martins delivering hacksaw-throated, gurgle-growled lyrics. There’s also drummer Gabriel Marques and guitarist Jonathas Xavier, and one of them must be a strong singer as there are bursts of Slipknot-style harmonic choruses when the band fancy.
So far, so headbang-as-usual, but the racket AXTY make is attention-grabbing beyond that. For starters, there’s a hip hop aspect, made explicit on the opening “Pain Made Me” snippet, which cuts’n’chops the music about, but also coming to the fore when Martins adopts a spitting rap style. Vocally, he goes above and beyond the usual death metal roaring, with percussive snot-vomit noises that are truly demonic (as, notably, on “Closer”).
They’re also tight as Odysseus’s bow-string, some songs stopping and starting like meth-amphetamine-fuelled prog, the drums periodically imitating Sten-gun fire (check “Who I Am”), and manic deft guitar play slung into seconds-long breaks in the juddering assault, as on “Selfish”.
They rarely settle to straightforward thrash, instead going off on sudden tangents, or dropping in brief snippets, such as a baby voice saying, “Wait a minute,” on “All I Love”. Make no mistake, it’s demented moshpit material, for connoisseurs of such visceral mayhem, but it’s done with inventive panache. They are, of course, one of those bands with an impossible-to-read logo, but there are pop melodies hidden in the firestorm. If they continue down this road, they'll be ones to keep an eye on.
Below: Watch the video for "End This" by AXTY
