Brazil's AXTY have spent the last year building serious momentum, and The Pain Made Me Who I Am, landing via Napalm Records, feels like the record built to cash that momentum in. Between millions of streams, a run of buzzy pre-release singles, a stint on the road opening for Born of Osiris, and an upcoming run with Lacuna Coil, the band arrives at this album with the kind of trajectory that makes a debut-on-a-new-label moment feel less like an introduction and more like an arrival.
Thematically, the record is exactly what its title promises: a 12-track meditation on using pain as raw material rather than letting it be the end of the story. Opener "pain made me" sets that tone immediately, pairing crushing down-tuned riffing with hip-hop-inflected samples to build a defiant thesis around resilience and the idea that being knocked down repeatedly only sharpens whatever gets built back up, framing every attempt to break the narrator as material for something stronger. "who I am" follows and pushes that defiance into something almost triumphant, framing suffering as fuel for reinvention rather than defeat, all while the band shows off its polyrhythmic deathcore chops against soaring, anthemic clean choruses that make the hook feel genuinely stadium-sized. "dismay" shifts the record's energy into something more wounded and reflective, chronicling the collapse of a relationship built on imbalance, the sense of missed chances, broken loyalty, and a quiet resolve to not repeat the same mistakes twice. It's a tighter, more emotionally direct cut, less concerned with spectacle than with sitting in genuine disappointment before the album pushes back into aggression.
That aggression returns hard on "selfish," which turns its fury outward, aiming a sustained, venomous takedown at someone painted as parasitic and hollow, all ego, no substance, and headed for a reckoning the narrator has zero interest in softening. It's one of the album's most viscerally satisfying tracks, less about processing pain than about finally being done absorbing it. "everything is beautiful" swings in the opposite emotional direction entirely, trading outward fury for something bleaker and more existential: a meditation on rootlessness and exhaustion, questioning whether any of it is worth chasing when everything eventually rots away regardless. "all I love" keeps that weight present but reframes it around fear of loss and the sense of being crushed by the very things worth holding onto, paired with some of the record's most erratic, acrobatic guitar work and hypnotic rhythmic interplay. It's a song about wanting to hold on despite knowing the cost.
The instrumentation mirrors that tension, constantly threatening to spiral before snapping back into control. "closer" leans into a mix of vulnerability and grim humor, turning personal unraveling into something almost transactional, framing pain itself as a kind of currency the narrator can't stop spending even as it visibly costs them everything. "fragile" is one of the record's sharpest character studies, a direct confrontation aimed at an anonymous online aggressor, daring them to show the same nerve in person that they show from behind a screen. It's confrontational in a way that feels purpose-built for a room full of people screaming along, trading introspection for pure adrenaline. "break," by contrast, strips things down to something closer to collapse, chronicling a slow unraveling where every attempt to rise only sets up the next fall, love turning brittle and hope rotting the moment it's touched.
"nothing but pain" digs into numbness and depletion, the sense of being hollowed out until there's nothing left to draw from as one of the album's rawest, most unguarded moments, leaning into genuine despair rather than defiance for once. "with me" takes a darker, more confrontational turn still, framing a toxic relationship as something closer to mutual destruction, refusing to let either party walk away unscathed and imagining a shared reckoning neither one escapes. And closer "end this," which doubles as the album's first single, brings in noticeably more alternative and nu-metal flavor, ending the record on its most despairing note, a track that sits with exhaustion and hopelessness without offering easy resolution, closing the album's arc not with triumph but with quiet surrender.
Carrying all of it is front-man Felipe Hervoso, whose vocal range is arguably the album's biggest selling point as a genuine, dramatic swing between melodic, almost vulnerable cleans and guttural, high-intensity screams that gives every track its emotional whiplash. Hervoso doesn't just alternate between the two registers for effect; the shifts feel narratively earned, tracking the emotional arc of each song rather than existing purely as a technical flex. Guitarist Jonathas Peschiera, who also handled the album's mix and master, gives the record a dense, layered low end without sacrificing clarity, while drummer Gabriel Vacari anchors even the most chaotic passages with a sense of rhythmic purpose rather than letting the technicality overshadow the songwriting.
What ultimately makes The Pain Made Me Who I Am work is that it never treats its central theme as a gimmick. Track after track, AXTY use pain as an actual narrative engine, sometimes defiant, sometimes despairing, sometimes aimed outward at an enemy, sometimes turned brutally inward at the self, and the band's genre-blending instincts, pulling from deathcore, metalcore, hip-hop, and even nu-metal in equal measure, keep that range from ever feeling repetitive across twelve tracks. It's an album that doesn't pretend healing is linear; it lets fury, hopelessness, and triumph all occupy the same record, sometimes the same song, and trusts the listener to sit with that contradiction rather than resolve it neatly. For a band stepping into a new label home on the back of real momentum, The Pain Made Me Who I Am delivers exactly the kind of statement that momentum demands: something heavy, emotionally unguarded, and confident enough in its own identity to let vulnerability and violence share the same breath. It's a record that earns its title, and one that positions AXTY as one of modern metalcore's more compelling new voices.
A note: this album explores heavy themes around pain, hopelessness, and self-harm. If any of this hits close to home, you're not alone. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is available 24/7 in the US.
Here's their track "who i am":
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