Photo by Matt Fevrier

Artist: I Promised The World, the five-piece of vocalist and guitarist Caleb Molina, vocalist Hunter Wilson, guitarist Mason Nowlin, bassist Rivers Shutt, and drummer Mason Zschau

Location: Dallas, TX

Buzz: Don’t believe the hype, or at least take it at all at face value without digging deeper into it. It’s true that I Promised The World are the new faces of a burgeoning metalcore revival who have done some serious homework on the right way to smash a riff while calculating its angle just as heavily as they did during scene’s golden era of the late ’90s and Aughts when bands like Poison The Well, From Autumn to Ashes, and Snapcase were being signed to some pretty large rock labels. And yet, they’re so much more going on here than what the press has broadly stroked over their sound.

Having signed to Rise Records for the release of their latest effort, an eponymous EP of five tracks both fully-realized and brimming with even more potential for the young Dallas quintet to go further with beyond their 2024 foundational debut LP, Fear of the Fall, I Promised The World hears them stitching together the studio-pristine, widescreen ambitions of the aforementioned metalcore aesthetic (credit Jon Markson of recent Drug Church and Drain efforts alongside Adam Cichocki for that gloss) into a big feelings hydra head with that same era’s other punk and hardcore scenes including melodically muscular post-hardcore, post-rock atmospheres, crucially necessary twinklecore bridges, and spoken words interludes.

Piecing it all together with how there’s just as much deep-grieving emoting happening within the surging clean vocals as there are scorched Earths screams between vocalists Caleb Molina and Hunter Wilson on literally every single song, the listen doesn’t undersell the scale of what their band name invokes. In short, I Promised The World more than deliver.

Sound: The new romantics of the all-consuming metal and hardcore universe.

Recommended: “Proud”, “Bliss In 7 Languages”, and “Emerald Waltz” from their newly-released self-titled EP

I Promised The World’s I Promised The World is available now on Rise Records.