Survive The Sun

Survive The Sun make melodic deathcore that rewards patience. The band describes their music as deathcore designed to be sat with, and that phrase is the key to the whole project: these are songs built to be lived in, not just survived. Heaviness here is a vehicle for feeling rather than an end in itself, and the result is metal with weight, melody, and a real emotional center.

The group came together at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where guitarist Jackson Snowden and drummer Jake Thompson met as freshmen and ended up dorm mates. From there the lineup filled out into a genuinely far-flung crew: Snowden from Texas, Thompson from South Carolina, bassist Ethan Emery from Las Vegas, and vocalist Micah Burch, who hails from Australia and was famously recruited through a Facebook ad seeking a deathcore vocalist. They wrote and tracked their earliest material in the dorms before moving into a shared apartment together in 2019, and that lived-in, all-in-one-house chemistry runs all through the music.

Their catalog rewards a deep listen. "The Minds in Which They Feast" arrived in 2020 and laid out the template: crushing low end, intricate guitar work, and breakdowns that land with intention. "Forging the Nemesis," released in October 2022, was a clear leap forward, a more technical and polished statement mixed, mastered, and re-amped by Buster Odeholm of Vildhjarta and Humanity's Last Breath. The band has spoken about that track openly: it was only the second song they ever wrote together, and it traces personal trauma and the way suffering can reshape a person into something new, running the full gamut of emotional response. Its video grew out of a vivid waking vision of being pulled under by a crowned, armored figure, which tells you everything about how seriously they take atmosphere and imagery.

Since then they have kept building, with singles like "Toxin" and "Oroku Saki" extending their reach and sharpening their sound. Across these tracks you hear the influences they wear proudly, the textured ambition of Veil of Maya and Born of Osiris, the bludgeoning conviction of Thy Art Is Murder and Oceano, and the cinematic scope of Shadow of Intent. What ties it together is craft: this is a band that treats melodic deathcore as composition, layering melody against brutality so the heavy moments hit harder for the quiet ones around them.

They have backed it up on the stage, too. In 2021 they were chosen by Berklee to represent the school's metal scene at Welcome to Rockville in Daytona, a festival slot that put their songs in front of a serious crowd. They have done all of it independently, writing, producing, and releasing on their own terms, which makes the polish of the records even more impressive.

Survive The Sun are a band worth following closely: thoughtful, technical, and unafraid to make heaviness mean something. Start with "Forging the Nemesis," then sit with the rest.