Dying Wish

Trust Issues, and then a different name

The band now opening arenas across Europe began in Portland, Oregon in 2016 under the name Trust Issues, which lasted long enough for one EP: Finding Peace in the Darkness, released on 14 June 2017. The rename to Dying Wish came around 2018, arriving with a self-titled demo that drew a line under the earlier material and effectively restarted the project.

What followed was a local hardcore apprenticeship rather than a launch. The 2019 single Enemies in Red featured Bryan Garris of Knocked Loose, which placed the band inside a scene that was about to get considerably larger, and in 2020 they signed to SharpTone Records. Guitarist Pedro Carrillo has been blunt about why the roots matter to them, telling New Noise that in hardcore nobody can fake it because people know whether a band is part of the community or not.

The line-up settled in stages. Vocalist Emma Boster, guitarists Sam Reynolds and Pedro Carrillo and drummer Jeff Yambra have been the constant; original bassist Andrew Le left in 2022 and Jon Mackey took over, which is the five-piece that has made every record and every tour since.

Two albums that set the terms

The debut album, Fragments of a Bitter Memory, arrived on 1 October 2021 and did the obvious thing well: it took the melodic metalcore of roughly 2003 and played it without irony. The follow-up, Symptoms of Survival, was released on 3 November 2023 and was where the writing about the band changed from novelty to seriousness. Kerrang! described the record's dynamics as a natural progression from the debut rather than a repeat of it, and the record's central subject — surviving damage and then having to live with the survival — gave Boster something to write about beyond genre furniture.

Symptoms of Survival also settled the question of the vocals. Boster works mostly in harsh registers, with clean singing used sparingly enough that it functions as a structural device rather than a chorus reflex, and reviewers at the time singled out the control she had over the switch.

The touring built at the same pace. The band ran their own headline routing under the Come and Be Killed by Dying Wish banner in 2023, toured with Pain of Truth in 2024, and then took the support slot on Spiritbox's Tsunami Sea tour in 2025 — the step that moved them out of clubs and into rooms where most of the audience had not come to see them.

Snowed in with Will Putney

Flesh Stays Together was released on 26 September 2025 through SharpTone: ten tracks, 35 minutes and 55 seconds, with Will Putney producing, engineering, mixing and mastering. The band recorded at Putney's place and, as they told New Noise, were snowed in there for two weeks while making it — a detail that explains something about how airless the record sounds.

The stated aim was to stop chasing an influence. Carrillo framed the writing as being about what the band knows it sounds like now rather than what it wants to sound like, and Boster described pushing the clean vocals much further into the arrangements, pointing to an opening track that runs doomsday-weight chugs underneath singing. Chelsea Wolfe was one of the reference points she named for that texture. Boster has also defended the sleeve, which shows a woman suffocating inside plastic, as art made by women rather than an image of violence for its own sake, and said it reflected how she felt while making the record: suffocating in today's world.

The singles set the tone before release — I'll Know You're Not Around on 30 July 2025, then Revenge in Carnage on 27 August 2025. The reviews were the strongest of the band's career: Distorted Sound gave it 9/10 and called it a landmark in eerie metalcore, New Noise scored it 4.5 out of 5 and named it the band's best work, Kerrang! gave it four stars and framed it as a coming of age, and Metal Hammer settled on 7/10.

Where things stand, September 2026

The record's touring cycle has run for a full year without a real gap. The band announced a summer headline run on the back of it, opening on 13 July 2026 in Louisville and finishing on 5 August 2026 in Des Moines, with Guilt Trip out for the whole tour and HOLDER and Contention on selected dates; general on-sale was 1 May. Festival sets were slotted around it, including Rock Fest in Wisconsin, Inkcarceration at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield on 17 July, Upheaval in Michigan and a Vans Warped Tour appearance in Long Beach.

Since 12 September 2026 they have been the opening act on Spiritbox's Tsunami Sea UK and European tour, an 18-show arena run with Jinjer in the middle slot that began at the SEC in Glasgow and ends in Paris on 9 October. The remaining European dates include Zürich on 28 September, Frankfurt on 30 September, Hamburg on 2 October and Düsseldorf on 4 October.

After that the calendar goes straight back to North America. Dying Wish play Sick New World in Fort Worth on 24 October and Warped Tour in Orlando in mid-November, then join Imminence's Axis Mundi North American headline tour alongside Gaerea, starting at the Palladium in Worcester on 13 November and running through Los Angeles' Wiltern on 28 November and Chicago's Riviera on 10 December to a finish in Montreal on 13 December. Twenty-nine dates are on sale in total, the furthest out being A Day To Remember's Big Ole Boat Show out of Miami in late April 2027.

The hometown show they built for themselves

Boster moved to Nashville around 2022 but is a fifth-generation Portlander, and the band's answer to a touring schedule that kept skipping their own city is an annual December festival called Dying Wishmas. The second edition ran on 12 December 2025 at the Roseland Theater: nine bands, tickets at $50 before fees, roughly seven hours of music, a canned food drive and charity raffles attached. The bill deliberately mixed local acts such as Misery Whip with visitors including Gouge Away, Gridiron, Orthodox and the English band Static Dress.

The Portland Mercury's review of that night described a floor with no front-of-stage barrier and a void opening in the middle of it during the early sets. Dying Wish played for about an hour, drawing across all three albums but leaning on Flesh Stays Together, wore custom football jerseys, and closed with Innate Thirst with members of the supporting bands onstage. Boster, the reviewer noted, spent every moment she was not screaming grinning at the room. The band said from the stage that they intend to do it again in 2026.