BOLTCUTTER

A side project in the 541

Boltcutter came together in Eugene, Oregon in 2023, and by the band's own account the premise was a gag before it was a group. "It definitely started as a side project," drummer Kameron Tyler told This Day In Metal in an interview published on 2 March 2026. "We thought it would be funny to have a slam band." What turned the joke into a working unit was guitarist Alex Hannon, who kept producing demos until there was enough material to treat the thing as real.

The line-up has stayed put: Tristen Storm on vocals, Tyler on drums, Hannon and Josh Klimoski on guitars. Their self-description — "541 Idiotic Slamming Chainbreak Chuggery" — plants the flag on the Oregon area code and sets the register, which is slamming brutal death metal welded to beatdown hardcore, with samples doing as much work as the riffs. The first thing they put out was a 2023 promo, Catalytic Platinum Inhalation, followed by the collection The Slamz: Chronicles, Vol. 1, which gathered the early singles that still anchor the live set.

Klimoski has been plain about the craft hiding under the stupidity. "Being stupid on purpose is smart," he said in the same interview. "You have to be smart to write something that sounds intentionally low-IQ."

Still Broke, and the guest list

The debut album arrived on 10 October 2025 through Barbaric Brutality: nine tracks, lean, and unusually crowded with collaborators. Six of the nine carry features. Human Decomposition appear on "Twenty One Cars", Dredge on "Get From Round Here", Chain Gang on "Richless & Bitchless", Impact on "Irreversible Cashectomy", Load Tha Nine on "Green Tip Penetration", and — the outlier that tells the story — the New York rapper RXK Nephew on "Devious Contemplations". The remaining three, "Exit 263", "E.B.T. Exsanguination" and the closing title track, are the band alone.

Joe Anderson engineered the recording, Mychal Soto mixed and mastered it, and Lynch Cassidy supplied the artwork. The record's subject matter runs to haulage, firearms and being skint, which is not incidental: the band have said the title track carries a straighter meaning than the chaos around it suggests, and the album is named after the condition rather than the joke.

Nothing new has been announced since. Three years in, Still Broke remains the only full-length, and the autumn 2026 touring has been built on it.

The samples are the argument

What separates Boltcutter from the broader slam field is where they source their furniture. Storm has pointed to social media as the route by which younger listeners are finding heavy music again, and to trap, rap and hip-hop as the influences arriving with them. That is audible rather than theoretical: the records are stitched with blaxploitation and hip-hop samples sitting against guttural pig squeals.

The Portland Mercury made the point explicitly when it named Still Broke in its top ten Portland albums of 2025 on 20 November 2025, calling the band "irresponsibly heavy" and arguing that the sample choices "serve as reminders that slam and hardcore music have always had roots in Black and Brown culture". For a scene that often treats its own lineage as settled, that framing — from a general-interest alt-weekly rather than a metal outlet — did more for the band's reach than a positive review alone would have.

What the reviews said

The longest critical read on Still Broke, a Diazable review scoring it 8.5 out of 10, treats it as a debut that has already solved its production problem. The praise centres on clarity: the mix holds several vocal registers and a dense sample layer without thinning the low end, and the drum work and sample placement are singled out as the album's technical strengths. The reviewer credits the band with keeping technical execution, aggression, groove and occasional atmospheric detours in the same room without any of them diluting the others.

The same review supplies the dissent. Some of the guest vocals are judged slightly out of alignment with the band's own aesthetic, and "Devious Contemplations" — the RXK Nephew track, and the most exposed experiment on the record — is called an awkward fit, its humour and meta-commentary sitting badly against the heavier material either side of it. It is a fair read: the collaboration that most defines the band's ambitions is also the one hardest to place.

Autumn 2026: a hurricane, then sixteen dates

The current run was announced in early September 2026 — Metal Anarchy carried the dates on 4 September, Metal Newswire on 7 September — as sixteen shows between 20 October and 13 November with Misery Whip in support throughout. It is the band's first headline tour at that scale, and the venues are small: Amityville Music Hall, Alchemy in Providence, Foufounes Électriques in Montreal, Rum Runners in London, Ontario, Frankie's in Toledo, Slam City Skate Park in Fort Wayne, the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis, Gabe's in Iowa City, Soundbar in Fort Collins, What's Left in Colorado Springs, Jake's Backroom in Lubbock, The Echo in Los Angeles, Neck of the Woods in San Francisco and Real Art in Tacoma, with the Chicago date on 31 October folded into Gods of Chaos Fest.

Before it started they had already spent October on the road and on festival bills. Setlist.fm logs a set at The Truman in Kansas City on 9 October, Radio Room in Greenville on 16 October and Archer Music Hall in Allentown on 18 October. In between came Furnace Fest at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, where they were scheduled for the Pond Stage on Sunday 11 October from 3.20 to 3.55pm, on a weekend headlined by A Day To Remember and Bring Me The Horizon whose Saturday had been wiped out by a hurricane.

That Furnace Fest set produced the most useful eyewitness account of the band at this stage. The Alabama Take's review on 20 October described people climbing onto the pond stage and diving off it "for the first time, as far as I knew", noted that every word out of Storm appeared to be "get the fuck up" even though the crowd was already standing, and named a mass "fuck everything" singalong as the writer's favourite moment of the entire festival.

As of early November the tour is in its back half, with the Texas, California and Washington dates still to run before it closes in Tacoma on 13 November.