Deadguy have a new record, an outcome as surprising as it is disorienting, 30 years after their first and only full-length release. In the time since, these pioneers of metalcore transformed into something like a cautionary tale, or maybe a cult object, depending mainly on how much you’re willing to sit with music that’s essentially built around psychic disintegration.
Framing this new album as a nostalgia trip or midlife crisis, however, oversimplifies something far more complex and unresolved. Near-Death Travel Servicesis not a reanimation of the past, but a confrontation with it—a kind of gesture rooted in the lingering sense that what happened back then was never entirely processed, musically or emotionally, or brought to any real sense of closure.
To understand why this new record feels like it’s been clawing its way out of a basement for 30 years, you’ve got to rewind to the mid-1990s, back when a handful of New Jersey 20-somethings holed up in a studio and recorded Fixation on a Co‑Worker (1995), a blast of noise that came off like a panic attack pressed to vinyl, the kind of record that hits like overhearing someone else’s breakdown and realizing that it sounds a lot like your own.
Volatile as the record sounded, it served mostly as the containment unit. What unfolded onstage made the studio version feel like the safety manual. In the flesh, under the lights, Deadguy resembled a kinetic malfunction, flailing about like electrified marionettes, their limbs jerking with a convulsive intensity that made it seem as though the distortion pedals had hijacked their nervous systems.
They didn’t last, of course. Emotionally, they were nowhere near equipped. Picture a quintet of post-college adventurers duct-taping their lives together, running on caffeine, sarcasm, and the vaguely romantic idea that DIY destitution was some noble rite of passage. Which it might’ve been, if the bread sandwiches didn’t run out and the van didn’t break down again. The whole thing collapsed by mid-tour. By the time the record actually hit shelves, the original lineup had already splintered, with two core members shuffling off to Seattle.
However, that album grew teeth, became canonical, an underground classic, an LP that actually deserves to be called a landmark album, serving as a grainy, bloodshot blueprint for a whole lineage of mathcore chaos agents: Converge, Botch, Dillinger Escape Plan, Coalesce. The record never went gold, but it infected everything.
Now fast-forward to 2023, where a documentary, Deadguy: Killing Music, appears not so much as a retrospective (though it does contain the requisite archival footage) but as a cinematic reassembly of something long ago blown apart. Somehow, all five members of the Fixation on a Co‑Worker lineup ended up in the same room for the first time in over 20 years, staring down the queasy truth that what tied them to the music wasn’t just the adrenal thrill of youth, but something unresolved and hard to categorize—shared purpose, but also identities welded together and then scattered like loose bolts from a machine nobody knew how to fix. Yet the record, the beautiful wreck they made, didn’t just outlive them but followed them, gnawed at them, the way certain albums do.
So now comes Near‑Death Travel Services, all these years later, which immediately raises the question: what the hell does a record like this even sound like? Like five men—older, louder, angrier in more complicated ways—staring down the same abyss as before, only now with better amplifiers, worse knees, and absolutely no illusions left? Steve Evetts is back at the controls, the same producer who somehow managed to capture Fixation on a Co-Worker in all its self-immolating glory, and the continuity isn’t just a throwback; it’s an act of sonic accountability.
The album sounds like a demolition derby locked inside a meat locker, and someone wired the walls. The band still fly the banner, “Death to false metal”, and the record feels averse to compromise. Singling out tracks feels borderline insulting—there isn’t a weak link in the wreckage—but if you pin me down, immediate standouts include “Barn Burner”, “New Best Friend”, “Cheap Trick”, and “The Long Search for Perfect Timing”. Maybe because amid a record full of riffs that tear like rusted dental drills and vocals pitched somewhere between a tantrum and some deep, involuntary reckoning, these are the songs already chewing on my frontal lobe, refusing to let go.
Lyrically, Near‑Death Travel Services centers on being swallowed whole by the meat grinder of modern life, then taking stock of what’s left when they spit you back out. Here’s five grown men crawling through the wreckage of what post-hardcore used to mean, still hardwired to scream about betrayal, only now the betrayal feels baked into the floorboards.
“Try to keep score while they change the rules” could double as a eulogy for the last 20 years of American life. There’s bitterness, sure, but also a kind of gallows wit (“I wish I was deep, but I’m two feet tall”) and an exhausted, slightly singed clarity: the building’s on fire, and you’re still inside because where else is there to go? If Fixation was about lashing out, Near‑Death Travel Services is about realizing the walls you were punching are load-bearing.
Near‑Death Travel Services delivers what the best hardcore records are supposed to—what the real ones do—which is to snarl back at whatever wretched condition humanity has currently slumped into, a sonic backlash that doesn’t just confront decay but rubs your face in it until you taste rust. You’d think, reasonably, that after Fixation on a Co‑Worker, a band this furious would’ve exhausted the venom, vented the spleen, grown older, and maybe even offered up a slightly domesticated version of themselves, Deadguy for a more wellness-oriented era.
But no. Instead, Deadguy have returned with a record that feels not only contiguous with their debut but almost as if they’ve been feeding this bile quietly for decades, letting it age into something denser, meaner, and more deliberately shaped. If Fixation was the initial outburst, Near‑Death Travel Services is the slow, unrepentant burn. The band haven’t mellowed; they’ve entrenched and dug in. This isn’t nostalgia, it’s red meat. How a group that first imploded in the 1990s have come back sounding this feral, this precise in their vitriol, is a minor miracle, or maybe just proof that the rage was never performative to begin with.