The bone-splintering sonic exorcism of Prison Of Flesh, one of the blistering new singles from Lorna Shore’s fifth album, I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me, is a scorching amalgam of brutal death metal, orchestral black metal, tribal industrial and jolting, shuddering deathcore – a nightmarish seven-minute-long rollercoaster ride on rotting rails in a carnival of unflinching punishment.
Even though the song has nothing to do with serial killings or other graphic atrocities, Lorna Shore have chosen to promote Prison Of Flesh with a horror-themed video about a woman whose mind unravels like yarn, making her more delusional and violent by the blastbeat, inevitably threatening her and her son’s survival.
“All I remember saying when I saw the treatment was, ‘OK, just as long as it’s gory’,” says Adam De Micco, the band’s lead guitarist and main songwriter, an hour before heading to the shoot at a creepy warehouse in suburban New Jersey. “We haven’t done a video like that yet, and it seemed like a good song to use for that kind of thing.”
As the old saying goes, be careful what you ask for. After Lorna Shore arrive at the shoot, a woman in make-up sits with the band – Adam, vocalist Will Ramos, rhythm guitarist and programmer Andrew O’Connor, bassist Michael ‘Moke’ Yager and drummer Austin Archey – and applies multiple coats of blood to their faces and bodies.
The first application contains alcohol and doesn’t easily wash off. Then, there’s a thick, slimy concoction that shines but needs to be reapplied after every take. Why? Because above the view of the cameras is an apparatus made of showerheads that spray fountains of blood on everyone all day long.
The next day, Lorna Shore are clean and dry, dressed in t-shirts. Everyone’s gathered in the living room of Will’s house. The only remnants from yesterday’s bloodbath are PDFs containing gnarly on-set images that look like crime scene photos, and Will’s hanging pink shirt, which used to be white before it was irreparably stained.
“Man, there were points from that video that are hard to even describe,” the singer says, sitting on an armchair and cracking open a can of IPA. “I don’t know if it was from my hair being wet or the goop dripping into my eyes. I tried to blink that shit away so I could see, and every time I opened my eyes again, it just felt stickier. It was fucking intense.”
'Fucking intense’ is deathcore’s factory setting. A post-death metal/metalcore hybrid that was spawned in the late 1990s/early 00s by bands like Antagony, The Red Chord and Despised Icon, deathcore typically features heavily distorted, downtuned seven-string guitars, a mix of high-speed beats and slow, chugging breakdowns, and deranged vocal noises, including high-pitched noises that would be dubbed ‘pig squeals’.
The genre exploded in the late 00s with early Job For A Cowboy, Suicide Silence, Carnifex, Whitechapel, All Shall Perish, Bring Me The Horizon and Thy Art Is Murder, with a third wave following in the 2010s. But since the start of this decade, deathcore has undergone an unexpected commercial surge, with Lorna Shore and Slaughter To Prevail leading the scene ever closer to a proper mainstream breakthrough.
“There’s no rivalry between us whatsoever,” says Andrew, who is largely responsible for the cinematic orchestrations and industrial sounds that enhance Lorna Shore’s music, of any potential competition between his own band and Slaughter To Prevail. “To be honest, we don’t pay any attention to what they’re doing. We’re only interested in what we want to do.”
In a casual conversation that veers from Job For A Cowboy to Psycho-Frame, it’s clear that Lorna Shore know their deathcore history. At the same time, they’ve always liked other kinds of music, including sweeping film scores, 80s new wave, classic rock and obscure death metal.
“Necrophagist is my favourite band, and extreme death metal is really my thing,” says Adam, a soft-spoken band-leader with a sedate lifestyle that matches that of most of his bandmates.
“Doing great death metal riffs is always in the back of my mind. But I’ve always thought of Lorna Shore as a metal band. I never saw us as deathcore. That umbrella seems too small to me. Metal should be an all-encompassing thing.”
Lorna Shore were formed in New Jersey in 2009, though they experienced a dizzying churn of personnel in their early years. Adam, who joined in 2010, is the longest-serving member, followed by Austin, who came aboard in 2012. Perhaps that instability contributed to the fact that Lorna Shore’s initial rise was unremarkable rather than explosive.
Between 2010 and 2020, they released a string of EPs and a trio of albums – 2015’s Psalms, 2017’s Flesh Coffin and 2020’s Immortal – that didn’t really break them out of the deathcore scene. That changed with 2022’s Pain Remains. The first full-length album to feature Will Ramos, it was an electrifying record and one that coincided with deathcore’s broader resurgence.
Will himself became a figurehead for this new wave of deathcore, thanks partly to an insane vocal range that spans guttural growls and ear-piercing squeals (he was famously the subject of a 2022 video in which a camera was inserted down his throat to record what was happening with his larynx as he sung).
I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me is like the work of a band who know they’re on the verge of something big. But is it even a deathcore record? It careens with dizzying, paradoxical arrangements and epic, rhythmic mazes, propelled by pummelling beats and concussion-inducing riffs. But there are also gliding strings, soaring choirs and euphoric melodies amid the Earth-shaking breakdowns.
“To be honest, I feel like we’ve gotten bullied into playing breakdowns because if we didn’t do them, no one would care about our band,” says Will. “It’s all because of peer pressure!”
“It’s been like that for a long time,” adds Austin. “There were all these Jersey lunkheads there when we released [2013 EP] Maleficium and Godmaker was our big song. It was influenced by black metal ambience, but there are two slow, crazy breakdowns. All these construction workers at the shows didn’t care about black metal. But they happily beat their friends up during the breakdowns – two times during a five-minute song. Awesome.”
The low-budget video for Godmaker accrued 1.4 million views on YouTube, and the song itself has been streamed 1.8 million times on Spotify. That’s impressive for any extreme metal song, yet it pales compared to the nearly 72 million Spotify streams for To The Hellfire from the band’s 2021 EP And I Return To Nothingness (Will’s debut with Lorna Shore), and most of the songs from Pain Remains range from 10 to 30 million streams.
This commercial breakthrough is hugely impressive, not least given the fact that for all their willingness to push beyond deathcore’s limits with I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me, Lorna Shore are still a fundamentally extreme band. How have they managed to attract such a huge fanbase with such uncompromising music?
“The fun thing is not knowing how we got so big,” Will says, eyes widening like a kid who’s found a hidden stash of homemade cookies. “Not having control over what we’re doing and just letting it work its way out is more exciting than sitting there and trying to figure out how we captured lightning in a bottle. That’s boring. And I think the fact that it happened organically is like a bonus. Everything’s very genuine. Maybe that has something to do with why people like it.”
There’s perhaps a far simpler reason metal fans have been so captivated by Lorna Shore. Will Ramos is the most charismatic, vocally inventive frontman since late Suicide Silence frontman Mitch Lucker. Wiry, affable and not at all bad looking, he’s dressed today in torn jeans, a black t-shirt and interlinked silver chains. His dyed pink-blond hair hangs down the right side of his head. The other side is shaved. Along with black plugs and sleeve tatts, the vocalist looks fashionable, yet edgy.
Onstage, he’s a feral beast, gesturing spasmodically, concocting the crazed sounds of the terminally possessed. Will laughs at the idea that he’s at all a formidable presence.
“I am the least evil person in the world,” he says. “Being this frickin’ evil monster thing onstage is so far from who I am as a person. But it’s so much fun.”
Will was born and raised in suburban New Jersey and has lived here all his life. As a teenager, a friend played Will deathcore. At first, he didn’t like it, but he gradually warmed to the aggressive sound, and was soon imitating screamers like Mitch Lucker, Dickie Allen from Infant Annihilator and Eddie Hermida from All Shall Perish. One night, Will dropped acid and someone played him Lorna Shore’s Godmaker.
“It was raining and I’m tripping my balls off and I’m going, ‘Whoaaaa, this is the craziest shit I’ve ever heard.’ I decided I’d listen to it later when I wasn’t on acid, and to my relief I still loved it.”
At the time, Lorna Shore’s vocalist was Tom Barber, who left in 2018. Then came CJ McCreery, who appeared on one album, 2020’s Immortal, but was fired after he was accused of sexual misconduct (no charges were brought, and the accusations were later retracted by the people who made them). After seeing YouTube recordings of Will performing Lorna Shore covers, the band brought him on tour for a trial run.
“I was in another band, Monument Of A Memory, and they said, ‘Hey, what are you going to do if Lorna Shore ask you to join?’,” says the singer. “They expected me to say, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I’m not going anywhere.’ But I was just like, ‘Hell yeah! If that happens, I’m leaving. Sorry. I love you guys, but Lorna Shore is the band I always wanted to be a part of!”
While Lorna Shore wrote all of Pain Remains in just over a month, they had a full year to complete I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me. They thought the extra time would make life easier, but for Adam, having more time made him second-guess himself and question the band’s direction.
“I’d say everything came from depression and ADHD,” he says, only half joking. “I was writing riff after riff, and most of it sucked. And if I thought something was good, I’d question whether anyone else would like it. It felt like there was an expectation, a standard I had to meet. And all this time I’m thinking, ‘Dude, you have all this great stuff going on in your life. If you write a bad record, it’s all going to go away.’”
If the whirlwind of scorching death metal riffs, atmospheric keyboards, IED breakdown bursts and frenzied guitar shredding reflect Adam’s abject frustration, Will’s otherworldly yowls are driven by even more palpable emotions: heartbreak and helplessness. Rather than write about splattery horror stories or apocalyptic scenarios, Will pulled pain from within. Prison Of Flesh has nothing to do with blood raining from the sky. It’s about a personal kind of hell he confronted growing up.
“It’s about dementia, which runs in my family,” he says. “I’ve walked past my grandma so many times and she doesn’t recognise my face. She texted me the other day and wrote, ‘Be careful when you’re driving over here. There’s a fire in [New Jersey city] Englewood.’ I’m like, ‘I moved a year and a half ago. I don’t live anywhere near there anymore.’ It’s crazy, ’cos that could be me one day. Or anyone. Dementia is so common.”
The morose, heavily orchestrated album closer, Forevermore, was inspired by an even more devastating incident.
“My brother-in-law had a blood clot that went to his lungs, and he stopped breathing and died on the spot,” Will reveals. “He was only in his 40s, and it made me think, because I have vein problems. I didn’t even realise I had a problem until I went to a vein doctor and she told me I have to wear leg sleeves every time I go on a plane. I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And she said, ‘If you don’t, you could die.’ I went, ‘Uh, OK. Leg sleeves it is.’”
With I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me imminent, and the two singles they’ve already posted receiving glowing praise, Lorna Shore are fizzing with excitement and optimism. At the moment, though, Adam is flying high for a different reason. Recently, his dad picked him up from John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens and what he said lifted his son’s spirits in a way that might last forever.
“He didn’t ask me how I was doing or anything,” Adam says. “He told me that Unbreakable was one of the best songs I ever wrote and one of the best songs he’s ever heard. And my dad grew up on Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin so he’s not a metal guy. So, for me, if someone says, ‘Oh, your band sucks,’ I can say, ‘Fuck you, I don’t care. Because my dad told me we’re awesome.’"
I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me is out now via Century Media. Lorna Shore tour North America from September 20 and the UK from ebruary 8 2026. For the full list of upcoming dates, visit their official website.
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