homewrecker.: eleven songs, twenty-seven minutes, no soft landing

homewrecker. play metalcore like a bruise they keep pressing. Never knowing when, but knowing this will end is eleven songs in twenty-seven minutes and change, out August 28 on Prosthetic Records, and it has no interest in pacing itself. The title is the whole argument: the ending is certain, the hour is not, so you may as well spend the time loud.

It arrives billed as a debut, which sits oddly beside records under the name going back to Worms & Dirt in 2012, then Circle of Death in 2014 and Hell Is Here Now in 2018. However you count it, this is the one being handed out as a first impression, and it moves like a band clearing the room before they start. Prosthetic is a division of MNRK Records.

Michael Briggs recorded, mixed and mastered it, and Civil Audio is credited alongside Prosthetic on the pressing. The players are Dominic Baylock on vocals and guitar, Eddie Oropeza on guitar and backing vocals, Dante Zatto on bass and Devin Kazmierczak on drums, with Tyler Odom adding vocals and Dakota Haire and Ringo Waterman on backing. Maria Baylock plays cello. Will Adams plays triangle. It is out as a download at $9, black vinyl at $28.98 and a CD at $11.98, and on a record this grim that triangle credit is either a joke or a threat.

The tag says metalcore, and the sadness runs through the writing. Brevity is the band's main instrument: most of these songs are over before a second idea can arrive, and they stop while they still sound like a fight rather than a composition. With this many voices stacked, the record piles up instead of blurring: two guitars, a rhythm section that never gets to settle, a crowd of backing vocals, a cello, and a triangle in there somewhere.

The opening pair sets the terms. 'Twink death penalty' is an argument about not deserving space or attention, about being made pitiful, and it stops as suddenly as it starts. Then 'The suicide of the summer' lets itself run, on guilt and shame, on holding something that is already ending. That tension, wanting the thing and reading the expiry date, runs the whole record. 'Lover fever' takes it into the body: a rope, being tied until the end, meeting in the ground.

The best songs are the ugliest. 'Your grave is calling… will you pick up?' is an open wound and a regret, and a person cut into two. 'regress' works the idea that every step closer counts as a failure, and the inability to cut someone out. 'Obituary of a coward' sits in isolation, suicide threats, a cold dark cell, and being used by someone who has not finished. The longest title here is also the longest track, 'One day i will turn all this pain into something beautiful like an instagram post or story', 3:43, and it concedes: silence, abuse, love carried out to the ground and left there. The title laughs at the idea of turning any of this into content. The song does not laugh back.

This is for people who grew up on the short, sore end of the genre and still judge a record by what it can do before the half hour runs out. It sits with screamo that has worse manners and hardcore with less patience. It is not for anyone who wants range, a slow one, or a reason to feel better by the last track. There is no soft landing, and nobody involved is building one.

What does not work is the velocity. Eleven songs, one mood, no gear change, and the sequencing puts 'Your grave is calling… will you pick up?' and 'regress' back to back as two sketches where one finished song would have landed harder. Then 'Welcome 2 the Block List' and 'Fear of loss' close the record on the note it opened with, holding too tight, checking obituaries, understanding without forgiving. By the end the sameness is the point, and it is also the cost. A record this short can afford one surprise. It does not offer one, cello and triangle included.

That adds up to a 3.5: a good record by a band that knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything else. It will mean a lot to a small number of people and nothing to everyone else, which is what this kind of debut is for. Twenty-seven minutes is a promise. Keeping it twice is a career.

Hear it