The Ghost in the Grid: Perth - Revenant (Album Review) Released: 7/15/20

 

Minneapolis doesn't get enough credit as a heavy music city. It sits in the shadow of coasts that are louder about themselves, a Twin Cities scene that tends to get defined by its folk roots and indie credibility rather than its capacity for punishment. But Perth, the band, not the Australian city, is making the kind of argument that changes that conversation. Their debut EP, Revenant, is five tracks and fifteen minutes of djent-inflected metalcore that announces a band who showed up knowing exactly what they wanted to say and precisely how hard they wanted to say it. The EP opens with "Reform/Redesign," and the title alone signals intent. This is a band thinking about transformation, about the gap between what something was and what it's becoming. In djent, that kind of conceptual framing often stays theoretical. The genre can become so enamored with its own technical architecture that the emotional core gets buried underneath the math. Perth avoids that trap from the jump. "Reform/Redesign" hits with the structural precision the genre demands while keeping a thread of genuine urgency running through it. You feel it moving somewhere. That matters more than it sounds.

"Insanity" follows, and the sequencing is smart. Where the opener establishes shape, the second track leans into controlled chaos, the kind that only reads as unhinged because the band is confident enough to let things breathe in the uncomfortable places. Djent and metalcore are both genres built around tension and release, around the moment the floor drops out beneath you, and Perth understands this rhythmically in a way that goes beyond just knowing their influences. These aren't borrowed moves. They've internalized the language and started writing their own sentences in it. Then comes the "Interlude," and this is where Revenant reveals something about itself. A lot of heavy EPs treat interludes as placeholder moments, a breath before the next assault, atmospheric filler that exists mainly to give the listener a second to recover. Perth uses the space differently. The interlude on Revenant functions more like a hinge, a pivot point that recontextualizes what came before and reshapes your expectations for what follows. It's a brief moment, but brief moments handled with intention are what separate records that feel designed from records that feel assembled.

"Halcyon" is the EP's centerpiece and the track that earned Perth their most visible press attention, racking up over 20,000 plays on the music video and landing coverage from outlets like Metal Noise and Girl At The Rock Shows. It's not hard to understand why. "Halcyon" is the kind of song that great singles in heavy music are supposed to do; it takes everything the band does well and distills it into its most accessible, most immediate form without softening the edges. The groove is undeniable. The dynamics are generous. It's the song you play to someone when you want to explain what this band is about without having to explain anything at all. "The Ascent" closes the record, and the title earns its place. After fifteen minutes of tension and reconfiguration, the EP ends on something that feels genuinely earned rather than merely concluded. It doesn't wrap up neatly. This isn't music interested in neat resolutions, but it lands with a sense of direction, a forward momentum that makes the EP feel like the beginning of something rather than a complete statement. That's exactly the right note to end a debut record on.

What runs through all five tracks is a quality that's harder to manufacture than technical skill: coherence. Revenant sounds like a band that agrees with itself. The metalcore influences and the djent architecture aren't pulling in opposite directions; they're in genuine conversation, each making the other stronger. The polyrhythmic guitar work gives the heavier breakdowns more structural weight. The melodic sensibility inherited from metalcore keeps the more complex passages from disappearing into abstraction. The balance is real, and maintaining it across a debut record is no small thing; they've performed at some of the Twin Cities' most respected heavy music venues. For a debut release, the footprint is real. But what's more interesting than the coverage is what the coverage is responding to: a band that plays with enough conviction to make people in crowded rooms forget they've never heard the songs before.

 That's a superpower, and Revenant captures it. The EP is fifteen minutes and twenty-three seconds long. In a genre that frequently mistakes length for ambition, that runtime is a statement in itself. Perth said what they had to say, made every second count, and got out. There's confidence in that restraint, the confidence of a band that trusts its own material enough not to bury it in runtime.  Revenant is a debut record that sounds like a band arriving, not auditioning. Minneapolis has a heavy music identity worth paying attention to, and Perth just made one of the better arguments for why.

Don't take my word for it. Press play and listen for yourself:

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