Dying Wish - Kiss of Judas

Sometimes all you need is a good, cathartic release. There are plenty of more soothing avenues; yoga, whale song or buying thirty puppies to roll around on the floor with. Some people choose a more engaged path; taking up kickboxing lessons, or crafting life-size papier mâché versions of your enemies and beating them with a stubby wooden bat, pinata-style. Different strokes for different folks.

Our preferred form of therapy is putting new holes in things that had fewer holes, or that didn’t have holes in before, via the medium of sound. Which is where Dying Wish come in very useful. The five-piece melodic metalcore outfit out of Portland, Oregon are experts in blowing stuff up. Sound systems, hearing aids, the patience of the boomer generation, you name it. They themselves are blowing up, too; following their debut full-length Fragments of a Bitter Memory in 2021 with the outstanding Symptoms of Survival in 2023. This is a band on the rise, there’s no doubt about that, the sort of meteoric jump that is usually associated with late 90s disaster movies. Bonus points for figuring that reference out, readers!

Fresh from what might be one of the metal albums of the year 2023 in the aforementioned Symptoms of Survival, we’re turning the intensity up with the plan to see you into your weekend the proper way. By proper, we of course mean screaming until your throat gives up and you make the neighbours call in to make sure you aren’t being murdered by a particularly loud assassin. So yeah, the proper way. Kiss of Judas is a measure of Friday feel-good that can only be measured in decibels, so knock those negative vibes loose with this one.