Love it or hate it, metalcore had a moment in the early 2000s. By 2004, nearly every guy in my youth group had started buying girl pants and going to shows. Most of the girls—even the prissier ones—dyed clumsy two-toned chunks into their hair and got facial piercings (my sister, who decidedly does not enjoy heavy music, even had a Monroe for a while after becoming friends with one of the scene girls at our church).

Local music scenes all across the world were filled with bands whose members had seen Zao once and had their lives changed. And while much of the obscure metalcore deserves to be buried in the sands of history, there are some gems buried.

One of the sparkling jewels that has long languished in obscurity is Subsist, an energetic outfit our of Peoria, Illinois whose career has been treated by a footnote in the careers of their members—who have gone on to play in bands like Minsk and Dead to Fall. Their sole full-length was burned to CD-Rs and given away, where they were probably listened to a couple times before being filed away in CD travel cases to be destroyed by rogue grains of sand.

Luckily, the album wasn’t lost forever, and now sees its first proper release in the form of a fully remixed and remastered vinyl reissue.

If you lived through the metalcore scene of the turn of the Millenium, you probably already have a good idea of what to expect here. Guitars are detuned to oblivion and distorted as far as possible. Drums are precise and powerful, deftly navigating rapid shifts in rhythm and tempo. Vocals are primarily screamed, with a few moments of clean melodies and spoken word sprinkled in for spice. There are obvious, inescapable influences from Botch, Coalesce, and Zao, and countless opportunities to open up this pit.

And as someone who grow up going to these sorts of shows in the Midwest in the same era (though a few years later), this is exactly the sort of stuff that would have gotten me to test the tensile strength of my too-tight jeans with some windmill kicks. Even now, I’m transported back to that era with such vivid detail that I can practically smell the musty coffee houses and sweaty church gymnasiums and smoke-stained VFW where I would have seen them play these songs.

While I honestly only enjoyed around…30% of the actual music that the bands at metalcore shows would play, I stuck around through all of the Norma Jean and As I Lay Dying wannabes in hopes that I might hear a band like Subsist. The Rhythm Method checks every single box of that moment in time and then some. It doesn’t just combine the same influences that everybody was going for in a better way than anyone else: it manages to find its own voice too. And with this reissue, that voice finally gets the platform it deserves.

The Rhythm Method is out May 6th through Steadfast Records and Dropping Bombs.

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