Dying Wish

Dying Wish aren’t precious about labels. Hardcore lifers, metalcore maestros, political rabble-rousers — all of these tags apply to the Portland quintet, who’ve become a fixture of the heavy music landscape without sacrificing the DIY ethos instilled upon them as teens. After gaining underground notoriety in the late 2010s, Dying Wish emerged from the pandemic with two battering albums, Fragments of a Bitter Memory (2021) and Symptoms of Survival (2023), that catapulted them to the forefront of today’s thriving hardcore scene. Live, their crowds are rambunctious no matter who they tour with, whether it’s hardcore knuckle-draggers Pain of Truth or metalcore bigwigs Spiritbox.
Throughout the last few years of constant road-dogging and consistent artistic development, the members of Dying Wish — frontperson Emma Boster, guitarists Pedro Carrillo and Sam Reynolds, bassist Jon Mackey, and drummer Jeff Yambra — have also grown immensely as people. Their bracing third album, Flesh Stays Together, reflects not just their “hardened” worldview, as Boster puts it, but also their bold confidence as songwriters who aren’t afraid to shake up tired metalcore formulas.
“I think a lot of things that we’re doing now haven’t really been done in the way that we’re doing it,” Boster says proudly. Carrillo, who splits lyrical duties with Boster, concurs about Dying Wish’s codified vision. “We now know what we want to sound like rather than what we think we want to sound like.”
Flesh Stays Together is a daring evolution of their neck-throttling sound: nastier, catchier, riskier, and more lyrically uncompromising than any of their previous works. The most face-mauling songs they’ve ever written live alongside their moodiest ballads, and the record’s severe eclecticism is bound together by a dire hopelessness directly informed by the ongoing atrocities Dying Wish refuse to shy away from — genocide, fascism, and societal collapse.
“We didn’t want it to feel like a solution-oriented record,” Boster says. “We wanted it to feel hopeless. Like, we’re so fucked. There’s hardly a positive message, if any at all, on the record.”
The album’s kinetic sound was achieved in collaboration with Grammy Award–winning producer Will Putney (Knocked Loose, Gojira), who recorded the band at his wooded studio in New Jersey. Throughout the wintry recording session, relentless snowfall trapped Dying Wish in the booth, where they’d gaze out at feet of snow and channel those desolate vibes into what they were making. Instead of drawing from the familiar well of metalcore luminaries, Dying Wish looked to more unexpected sources for inspiration: Lamb of God’s political invective on Ashes of the Wake, Ethel Cain’s gloomy ambient experiment Perverts, and the foreboding atmosphere of cinematic feats like American Psycho and Joker.
“We had the conversation of, ‘what if we got heavier and still had more singing?’” Boster explains.
Flesh Stays Together’s stark aura comes through palpably on lead single “I’ll Know You’re Not Around,” a surefire standout that hinges on the uneasy tension between Boster’s eerie clean singing and the band’s merciless clobbering. The lyric, “A life in agony is worse than death / I no longer care what comes next,” vividly conveys the band’s depleted optimism about the world their generation has inherited.
“There’s an underlying theme that God has abandoned us,” Boster says of the bleak subject matter. “And if God is cruel, we’re worse.”
Dying Wish have no desire, either visually or lyrically, to retreat into the world of fantasy, pointedly avoiding ghoulish mysticism, supernatural fables, and other well-treaded metal clichés. “That’s not scary,” Carrillo says. “Being alive is scarier. Watching the news is scarier than any type of horror trope.”
Even the more personal songs tie into Dying Wish’s universal vision. Album opener “I Don’t Belong Anywhere,” which grows from a brooding slow-burn to a chugging massacre, originated as the band’s middle finger to the music business.
“We feel like we don’t really fit in in a lot of places within the industry,” Boster laments. “People want to assume that because we have a girl in the band we’re a gimmick, or lump us in with a group of artists that we don’t identify with.”
As the song developed, it began to take on a more nuanced meaning for Boster that ties into the album’s wider motif of political distress and social decay. “It became about feeling like I don’t belong anywhere in general,” Boster explains. “Being a woman in heavy music and a queer person in the current American political climate.”
Dying Wish are unabashed radicals, whether they’re tastefully incorporating Boster’s haunting croons into the most brutal song in their oeuvre (“Revenge in Carnage”) or concluding their scathing metalcore opus with a trudging power ballad about the necessity of love — in Dying Wish’s own, twisted way, of course. “I’d massacre all of heaven for you,” Boster shrieks during the bludgeoning, mosh-inducing finale of “Flesh Stays Together.”
“It could all be simple if we just loved each other and treated each other with respect,” Boster sighs.
Dying Wish knew they needed a striking image to capture the record’s multifaceted intensity — the desperation, the violence, the flecks of romantic salvation — in all of its glory. An album cover guaranteed to make a 14-year-old record store patron’s eyes light up before woefully exclaiming, “My mom is not gonna let me buy this.” Working with photographer Imani Givertz, the band created arresting artwork that looks straight out of a horror movie. The figure being asphyxiated is indeed scary, just like the reality Dying Wish have written about.
“Being alive in this day and age is fucking suffocating,” Carrillo says bluntly. “It feels like someone has a bag over my head at all times.”
With Flesh Stays Together, Dying Wish aren’t offering listeners a breather from the daily torment — they’re pulling the shrink wrap even tighter. If only all metal albums dared to be this physically, emotionally, and conceptually provocative.