Dying Wish: A World In Despair
Portland quintet DYING WISH roared to the head of the “revivalcore” movement with their debut album, Fragments Of A Bitter Memory in 2021. Fusing modern hardcore sensibilities to metalcore straight from the early 2000s, replete with KILLSWITCH ENGAGE-worshipping choruses, they were arguably the best band at the time doing that particular sound. 2023’s Symptoms Of Survival branched out from that template, but still kept its roots. Now, though, third album Flesh Stays Together arrives to firmly announce them not as the ghost of 2000s metalcore past, but firmly on their own terms. We sat down with vocalist Emma Boster and guitarist Pedro Carillo to talk about their desire to push their own boundaries and why it’s such an angry, often nihilistic record.
“Musically, we didn’t want to do the same thing again,” Pedro explains. “With getting older, our influences don’t change but there’s more to pick from now.” In the run up to touring with SPIRITBOX earlier this year, they dropped standalone single I Brought You My Soul (Your World Brought Me Despair), as they were writing what became Flesh Stays Together. “It just sort of happened,” Emma admits, “we didn’t go into it with the intention that it was a standalone, or where we were going to evolve from there. When we listened to the record altogether, we realised it didn’t need to be on it.”
That broadening of influences might surprise some in just how broad the band goes. Though they’ve talked openly about an appreciation of other genres, it’s perhaps a little more apparent now that DYING WISH want to draw from a deeper well. Pedro muses, “if you’re going to consider yourself an artist, you always want to beat your last project regardless of what it is. If we’d kept with the nostalgia core tag, the ceiling would have been hit.” To that end, they draw from influences as disparate as ETHEL CAIN this time as well as their more well-known hardcore influences.
“It’s more like the song Punish [from ETHEL CAIN’s January release, Perverts]. It’s just so haunting and I love the way it makes me feel,” explains Emma. “It’s uncomfortable and her lyrics are so honest. It was the overall haunting vibe of the song. A lot of our older tracks have that brighter production, the melodies are brighter. This is a lot more minor and more depressive, which is what I was trying to channel.”
Coming into Flesh Stays Together with a newfound confidence in themselves, they almost decided to forgo the entire album rollout process itself, as Emma explains, “we toyed with the idea of just dropping the record but decided we’d be doing ourselves a disservice with all the effort we put in.” Pedro agrees, “as much as I want to be confident in saying we can do whatever we want, sometimes we have to think more about what would benefit us now. We’re still grinding, essentially.”
When it comes to the wider scene, they still consider themselves outsiders. After emerging through the revivalcore movement in the early 20s, they’ve grown, but the scene hasn’t kept up. Album opener I Don’t Belong Anywhere partially addresses this, Emma explaining that, “we’re in a really interesting place right now, and that’s what I Don’t Belong Anywhere was written about. We’re having to create our own path and it’s stressful. This whole year has been stressful, trying to figure out how do we do these big tours with POPPY and SPIRITBOX and write a record, try new things, not upset our fans but also stay true to ourselves. It’s been crazy.”
There’s a deeper meaning, too; one of the overriding themes of the album is that the world right now is – not to put too fine a point on it – fucked. Here, Emma focuses on her own experience of being a queer woman in America, a country that is becoming increasingly hostile towards women and queer people. “That was where a lot of it began,” she begins. “There are people in the world that don’t want us to have rights… we’re going down a path to where my identity is not recognised or appreciated.”
With the rise of the far right, fascism and authoritarianism taking root in America and an ongoing genocide in Palestine, it’s a terrifying moment in history, and it seeps into the album hugely. “It’s very nihilist,” Emma admits. “That’s not really who I am as a person, but this year it’s how I’ve truly felt. I do want to have a more optimistic outlook on it, but in the depths of my soul, I truly feel, how do we begin to get out of this, as a society?” Instead of offering the potential for growth and healing as Symptoms did, Flesh turns outwards with a dire warning of what happens if we don’t take action as a society.
“You have to lean towards the good things you have in life,” says Pedro. “Humanity as a whole has been through the wringer, but it somehow finds its way to get to the opposite side. You can only do what you can, and if you lean towards the people you love, you can find those little bits of hope in this whirlwind of bullshit we’re in right now.” Emma is far less positive – perhaps still reflecting the mental state while writing the album. “Even though the band is doing the things I always wanted to do and I have great people surrounding me, I’m not happy, and it’s because of the condition of the world.”
“It’s so much worse than I imagined, I’m not gonna lie,” is Emma’s honest assessment of the state of the world, and Flesh Stays Together reflects that in its furious aggression from the scathing Revenge In Carnage to the more sonically tender, but no more lyrically devastating Nothing Like You. We put it to them both, how or if they can find happiness and what that looks like when the world is going to shit around us. “If there is a message on it, it’s this place is fucked,” Pedro admits, “but if you can find the little bits of hope and humanity, they’re there. We wrote the title track about our partners, because even in this cesspool, you can still find love for somebody that’s in the cesspool with you and going through all that too.”
Flesh Stays Together is out now via SharpTone Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS124 here:
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