REVIEW: girlsbeinggirls – girlsbeinggirls [2025]

Artist: girlsbeinggirls
Album: girlsbeinggirls

Everyone has heard the old adage the only constants in life are death and taxes. I would like to submit a humble modification: the only constants in life are death, taxes and mathcore. Hear me out. The year is…2000-something? Not entirely sure, but I can paint a picture. It’s me and three of my best friends gathered around an oversized early-model flat-panel TV at 1 in the morning playing Halo 2 split-screen Xbox Live. A delightful chime erupts from my hand-me-down, busted-ass Gateway laptop—a torrent has finished! The torrent in question? 10 GIGS OF METALCORE/MATHCORE/HARDCORE/DEATHCORE/GRINDCORE—and it was just that. Inside, I would find my first exposure to Wecamewithbrokenteeth, Preschool Tea Party Massacre, Daughters, An Albatross, Grace Gale (who would go on to become my favorite band) and so many more. I’d dabbled with some of the bigger names in mathcore, grindcore, whitebelt and so on—but this is where it went from passive exposure to a (somewhat spontaneous) deep dive. Now? The year is 2025. The Halo Franchise has…well, maybe easier to say it just hasn’t in a while. I’m pretty sure Demonoid and uTorrent don’t exist anymore, and I just can’t knock back the Code Red like I used to. But there’s still that chime—it just happens to come from Wax Vessel’s own Nik Velleca, and instead of 10 gigs of -core with varying levels of obscurity straight to the dome, it’s the debut title from the mathcore revival’s latest soldier on the frontlines: girlsbeinggirls. Without shoving about fifty different comparisons down your throat, the best way to frame this record is that it could have just as easily been unearthed from a time capsule buried in 2007 and I’d be none the wiser. Frantic, chaotic, relentless and downright sassy, girlsbeinggirls distills the essence of what a revival should look, sound and feel like.

I’m not sure there’s a better word out there than zany to describe the instrumental approach taken by girlsbeinggirls on their debut offering. Every song is bare naked in its attempt to make the listener uncomfortable, which is about the closest girlsbeinggirls get to having a true-to-form gimmick. There is only one track over 120 seconds long, and it barely hits that mark—which means every song you get is a distilled, not-from-concentrate slab of immolating mathcore, full stop. You want to revisit the shwooped-hair, raccoon-stripe neon-haze of the mid-to-late 2000s? Look no further than “You’re Gonna Die, Clown.” Here, angulated, spastic guitars bump uglies with frantic, hammer-handed percussion that sounds something like what I imagine the inner monologue of a chihuahua to sound like (complementary). You want something a little slower? Tough shit, I’m not sure you get something much slower throughout the entire release—unless you want to get beaten to an absolute pulp by mammoth breakdowns, in which case, songs like “IDFMAHAMEASMFSIWK” got you covered, as does the absolutely languishing album closer, “Bayville Boi Party (at the Haunted Haug),” a song that starts with dancy hi-hats and ends in total devastation. At best, girlsbeinggirls are unpredictable. At worst, they’re an unapologetic assault on the listener’s psyche. Every song has its foot on the gas until it doesn’t, stuttering from a raucous mash-up of frenzied riffing and flashy drumming into world-ending breakdowns. Girlsbeinggirls is an earnest and wholly successful at dragging the whimsical, blistering and frankly confusing stylistic leanings of mathy, mosh-friendly whitebelt into 2025.

As if trying to accurately describe the band’s instrumental approach without the “sounds like band x impregnated band y and the offspring got eaten by band z” comparisons, girlsbeinggirls’ vocal approach is, simply put, retrofitted from the late 2000s. Whiny, sing-songy and also pulverizing all in one go, songs like “I Met the Guys From 302 and All I Got Were These Lousy Socks” and “You’re Gonna Die, Clown” highlight what I consider to be the essence of this style. Grisly, gurgly bellows segue sharply into half-spoken, half-chanted, half-whined passages (shut up, I’m not a mathematician) faster than you can blink—and it works, because the band’s instrumentation pivoted on the very same time. One second, you’re getting your shit kicked in by breakdowns that wouldn’t be out of place at a lights-on VFW show (from the same era), the next second, you’re getting ready to dance the rumba to some fun, splashy hi hats. Hell, at one point, you might have even heard “Smoke on the Water?” Hard to say. The gist is that this style of -core doesn’t work if the band doesn’t have the confidence to match the instrumental whimsy with vocal dynamism—and girlsbeinggirls nail it.

In my mind, what separates a good revival artist from a great revival artist is being able to emulate not just the sound, but the attitude and ambiance of whatever era they’re trying to revive. If we look at the MySpace Deathcore revival, for example, there are plenty of bands that can (and did) write The Cleansing 2—with most of them good and fun in the same way that pizza is delicious but will leave you hungry for something more an hour later. If we contrast that against the few revival bands that didn’t just latch onto a load-bearing album from that era and replicate it but truly took the sound and carried it forward, you go from talking about a pizza to a full plate at the cookout. While the mathcore revival is in it’s relative infancy, we can see that dichotomy happening already, with girlsbeinggirls readily demonstrating they’re able to fill the listener all the way up. Everything about the band feels authentic—from the song titles that take more time to read than the song has runtime to the intentional, obtuse attempts to outright bewilder the listener with depraved, ruthless dissonance. This is a release that, for lack of a better and more eloquent way to describe it, feels like high school, or wherever you were when you heard …Fuck It?! For the first time. It’s fun, catchy, abusive and uproarious all in one, reigning girlsbeinggirls as prodigal rulers of the mathcore revival you probably didn’t even know was happening.

9/10
For Fans Of: HeavyHeavyLowLow, Gnostician, The Blood Brothers, SeeYouSpaceCowboy, Duck Duck Goose
By: Connor Welsh